Sucking Salt is an ongoing research project that focuses on archiving Caribbean architecture and aesthetics. It seeks to expand architectural history by positioning the Caribbean not as a peripheral footnote, but as a site of material, cultural, and historical significance. As a region shaped by layered colonial histories and migrations, the Caribbean offers a unique lens through which to understand how architecture becomes a space where multiple cultures meet, adapt, and transform one another.

Sylvia Wynter describes the historical trajectory of the Caribbean as a “third culture sphere”: neither Latin nor Anglo-Saxon, but a syncretic Euro-African or Afro-European continuum that also incorporates Central America. Within this context, cultural syncretism can be understood as a process of exchange and adaptation that emerged through contact between Indigenous, European, and African peoples in the so-called New World, resulting in new, hybrid cultural and material expressions.

Curaçao holds a particular place within this history. As one of the most significant locations in the Dutch participation in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the island bears deep traces of these entangled histories in its built environment. West African aesthetics, for example, left a lasting imprint on the island’s architecture, especially in the kunuku houses that were originally built as slave dwellings by enslaved West Africans. Alongside this, vernacular architectures developed outside of colonial styles, forming parallel architectural lineages.

During the nineteenth century, Curaçao experienced an influx of migrants from Europe, South America, and other parts of the Caribbean and Africa. This resulted in increasingly eclectic architectural expressions that combined elements of Dutch, Spanish, French, and Caribbean traditions, often characterized by bright colours and ornamental details. Like much of the Caribbean, many architectural styles were developed in the colonial core and adapted to local climate, materials, needs, and aesthetic languages. This process of exchange and adaptation has shaped the island’s built environment over time.

In the following images and descriptions, Sucking Salt presents a selection of ten buildings across Curaçao that exemplify these processes of syncretism and cultural exchange. The selection spans a wide range of architectural expressions, from art deco and brutalism to vernacular structures in both historical and contemporary forms, as well as the use of natural materials such as wattle and daub or sand. Read together, these buildings form a web of aesthetic collisions, mirroring the collisions of cultures both parallel and distinct.