Aesthetics of social identity: re-framing and evaluating modernist architecture and planning as cultural heritage in Martinique

This paper presents a little-known project in Fort-de-France, Martinique, by the French practice Candilis Josic Woods, as a starting-point for an anthropological framing of the cultural significance of modernist architecture and planning in Martinique between the 1960s and the present day. It responds to a dearth of research and scholarship on the modernist architectural legacy in the Caribbean region in general. Well known for its post-war mass housing projects in France and earlier experimental housing in Morocco of the 1950s, Candilis Josic Woods’ work in the French Antillean territories during the post-war years is hardly documented. This paper draws on archival and literary sources to consider the historical and cultural significance of this output at two levels: (1) within the context of the practice’s own commitment to an architectural approach founded in an anthropological understanding of culture and everyday life and (2) as part of the author’s ongoing work to develop an anthropological framing of modernist architecture and planning as cultural heritage within the context of postcolonial discourses and concepts of creolization, and to argue the need for detailed ethnographic fieldwork at the neglected peripheries of canonical modernism to support this line of enquiry through future research.