Island Connoisseur – Orjan Lindroth

A legacy in the making – in his own right, this month’s Island Connoisseur Orjan Lindroth is the visionary behind Schooner Bay, a sustainable community on the rise on Great Abaco Island – a development that is no less of a legacy in the making. Swedish-born, however having called Nassau, The Bahamas home at an early age, the archipelago of islands have served as a foundation for the beliefs which Orjan has set out to build on. As you will read the beliefs that define his development philosophy weigh heavily on logic that has stood the test of time. With this said, he is no doubt building a sound foundation for future generations. On a more personal note, or what Orjan would call a micro perspective, this interview ended up being a deeply personal one for me as it reaffirmed the belief which The 700 Experience was founded on – the recognizing of The Bahamas as a destination that offers more than just sun, sand and sea. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. said, “One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”

VP: Let’s get straight to it, who are you as a developer, what is your development philosophy? 
OL: Really what I do in terms of development, I think there are three things you need to know; you need to know numbers and the management side of it, you need to understand building from the ground up, but most importantly you need to understand design. Mastering the first two you get in to design and what really helped me understand design was growing up in Nassau. Nassau was a very good foundation to understanding mixed use development because that’s how everybody lived. There was a time in Nassau when everyone could walk to places, you didn’t zone things out – stores could live next to houses and houses could live next to stores. There was logic to it; in fact what we developers try to do today in zoning is we try and mimic what developers did naturally in those days. It came naturally from the use of place, climate and the economy of place. On top of that, there was a sense of architecture and style that came very naturally, in my opinion this has been lost in the developers and architects of today. Crafts people would do a proper dormer, they would know how to frame a window. They would understand the proportions of a window and the need for harmony and balance. The itinerant builders of those days basically knew this, they had a plan book that showed how to frame a roof and different pictures depicting how windows and doors worked together. At the end of the day, there was a really strong language and vocabulary of architecture here, one that is very relevant to today. It was about building communities and places which we are now trying to rebuild. Having destroyed those, now we are suffering from the lack of them – clearly we have to look back and see what they had that we don’t have. One of the things that I noticed during my career in Canada is that we were told what to build by traffic engineers essentially. Communities were built by traffic engineers who designed for cars, so ironically communities were built to accommodate cars, not pedestrians. There’s a trick question that you can ask anybody in North America, what’s the largest room in your house? The answer will be my garage. Once you look at plans you’ll see that the largest room in any house is the garage. But that thinking has created the urban plan for how communities evolve.  Can the car get there? Can it get there quickly? Can you hide a bunch of them? Can you get from the food-store to the highway? It’s destroyed basically the fabric of human ecosystems, which are urban places or should be, and created all the problems that we know about. Part of what’s happened in planning is this idea of zoning monocultures, which means the mentality of you can only sleep here, play here, work here and shop here has taken over. The flip of it is people say well you can’t have a store next to a house, which in fact in my opinion lends to the charm of a place, also if apartments are over stores then at night the store lined streets aren’t deadzones.

– “We believe urban places should have rules similar to those of nature. Botanist classify plants in natures zones and we use the same system to classify neighborhoods that are the building blocks of larger communities, with these transects ranging from undeveloped forests to urban cores in six different steps.” –

VP: Also I imagine the community would then take more pride in it…
OL: That’s a very important point. You take ownership. It is a very important point to understand, houses don’t build communities. They are really built by how you approach the street. The street is the skeleton that you fill in with buildings that serve different purposes i.e commercial and private real-estate. The buildings create the street, the street is the outdoor room, it’s the public place, but the street has to be owned by the shops and houses. If it is not then people retreat inside and they abandon the street, in essence it becomes a hostile place. That’s the big problem in planning today. We moved away from this mentality and given in to modern architecture.

Where the car has liberated us in many ways, it is also put the burden on us of having to travel further. We have gone too far the opposite direction and we have lost the facility of community along the way. In the Bahamas there is still enough memory of the language that people aren’t totally offended by the idea, in North America people are offended by the mixing of use. However that is changing, the new generation of people who are facing a more difficult economic time see the value of living in cities, in smaller places and not having to spend their money on a car. They also see the freedom and benefits of living in a city. Clearly we have to look at how we should live in built up communities. Those communities have to be very much a part of the natural world, that’s the most important thing of all. Development has taken itself outside the realm of nature and has adopted a very engineer approach and essentially we have overcome nature and now control it. The thought is we can go to a beach and build a bulkhead and hold back the ocean. Where in fact the best approach of all is to simply look at what nature is doing, use it to our advantage and become a part of it. That’s the most sustainable form of living of all. That’s becoming more and more recognized and I think in The Bahamas what we are trying to do at Schooner Bay is to use that very much so in the design philosophy. If you take the theory of what I have said and you find a blank canvas as we did then the end result is Schooner Bay. Schooner Bay is our attempt at trying to become in 200 years what Hope Town or Harbour Island is today. In other words the goal is to build a community that is going to transcend generations, be understood by generations.

– For boaters Schooner Bay is the first port of call if you are sailing by Whole in The Wall lighthouse to the Abaco Cays. There has never been a port in the south 50 miles of Abaco before.Boaters have been passing for five centuries and there has never been a harbour –

VP: Which leads me to ask about A Living Tradition, which is essentially a bible for Bahamian builders and architects. What inspired you to create the book?
OL: I undertook the project with Stephen Mouzon. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the South coast the governor of Mississippi was very concerned that the rebuild wouldn’t reflect the history of the place, the language of the architecture. So he commissioned a pattern book for the Gulf states, which Steve did in a ring-binder format, having seen it I said to Steve we need one of these for The Bahamas. I then got together with a group of people and we all contributed to the cost of producing a book. We commissioned Steve to photograph the architectural legacy that we have here in The Bahamas. We went up and down Eleuthera, we went to the Abacos and basically cataloged the history, roughly 250 years of architectural history and then defined the patterns that are unique to The Bahamas.  I was very interested in doing this for the same reason the Governor of Mississippi was. I was trying to create a pattern book to assist in the building of houses in The Bahamas. The book I saw for the Gulf states had a house from New Orleans that was identical to a house here in Nassau and it just hit home how like the architecture was and the reason for that being was because of the similar climates. The reason they had louvered shutters in an urban setting was to create privacy from the busy street. The design solutions that builder came up with in New Orleans about 200 years ago was the same that an independent builder came up with in The Bahamas. It proves the point that most design is the result in need of place, with intelligent solution applied to it. I really wanted this book to become a reference guide for those persons working on my projects but also those people that move to the Bahamas in search of building a home. When they say they want a Bahamian house, you hand them the book and say here’s how to build a real Bahamian home. A Bahamian house is not a Hawaiian, while that architectural style may be appealing here we should be looking at building houses with verandas, ones that use the sun differently, they should bring the outdoors in. A Living Tradition is available here.

VP: Which leads me to my next question, which is more of a statement. I’m sure you noticed the change that is taking place in Downtown Nassau where from artists Antonius Roberts’ Hillside House up to the Graycliff Hotel, passed the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas to the soon to be opened John Watling’s Distillery and down to the D’Aguilar Museum, there looks to be a unified effort in creating a more pedestrian friendly community…the one that you speak of. I think the change that is on the horizon is creating a real sense of belonging in the city of Nassau, which is a first for my generation. For visitors though it is creating a self-guided walking tour of some of the great pillars of Bahamian Architecture and more authentic experiences. Do you agree?
OL:
Absolutely. When I take in the years that I have been back in Nassau I’ve had many world-renowned architects visit and they marvel at what is still left here, the bones and structure of what once stood. It is a Victorian seaport that is challenged, beaten up and totally overwhelmed by the automobile and not in a good way. The foundation is still here. The problem with the city of Nassau is you don’t have people living in the city’s limits anymore and the people who are working there aren’t connected to the place. The more you create local stakeholders who understand the buildings and the place and build this fabric, the stronger it’s going to be. What’s going to happen is the city of Nassau will then evolve as places like Charleston did, to be in tact and respected. To evolve though the appreciation needs to start in isolated areas, you know Mayor Riley in Charleston set out to revitalize the city and it took twenty years. This is just the beginning. What it will show is there’s value in doing this, once economic value is recognized the respect will be adopted and built on. What the D’Aguilar’s did to restore the art foundation there on Virgina Street, well it is now a gem. One of the side streets is in our book A Living Tradition and given the foundation is there it would be very easy to go in there and build a neighborhood. As you say, West Hill Street where Graycliff is, I understand they are going to work on revitalizing that area and will bring about more shops. With the connection to Cumberland Street where Antonious’ art studio is, which leads you down to the main tourist thoroughfare, his studio will be one of the places that draw them up the hill. This is how it happens. It’s critical what Antonius has done there. He’s creating a happening place, he’s engaging people with an accurate restoration of what was a depilated building; but not only that he’s engaging them with a broader picture of the Bahamas. Across the street from his gallery and studio is the deanery, which is probably the oldest intact building in Nassau. It dates back to early 1700s, that’s from the pirate days, it’s a very valuable structure. Unfortunately we’ve relied on cruise-ships, fast food franchises and branded hotels to drive tourism but we have a huge asset which is our historical story, our visible history which is our architecture and it’s there. You can’t build that.
VP: I couldn’t agree more. 

VPIf you had to describe your Island Personality which island would it be?
OL:
Thats a hard one. I think I have to answer that in an indirect way. In my house, which you saw was recently featured in House Beautiful, I feel very happy because it represents how I lived as a child growing up here in The Bahamas and how I now live as a man with his own family. From a micro perspective there are parts of Nassau that still bring about a certain nostalgia, there are parts that I don’t give up on. I would like to think it could come back. Clearly at Schooner Bay, I am trying to plant the flag in the sand and say this is going to be here. I’ve always loved Harbour Island. But what these places really represent for me are a people, a way of living as opposed to a geographical location. All places in The Bahamas have the same landscape potential, beaches, etc. What I’m really looking for is a feeling of place, the people in it and the enjoyment of being there and seeing something that I think represents really what this country is about. As opposed to struggling in traffic and all the things we complain about. I am very happy right now living in this house because it is our expression of what I’ve tried to describe on a very personal level. On a macro level Harbour Island, Hope Town and Man-O-War Cay certainly because the quality of place is there. Of course Schooner Bay in the making. I suppose a part of what I’m trying to say is a place that has personality and is personal.

To Orjan and the Lindroth development family, thank you for being a part of the experience and for building a foundation for future generations.

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