In my photographic archives that have been donated to NALIS there is a colour slide of a tree I photographed over 50 years ago, an old samaan tree that stood in the south-western part of the Princess Building grounds opposite Bishop Anstey High School (BAHS). The Princess Building was still standing when the photograph was taken. Both have since gone. What was striking about that particular samaan tree was the outstanding shape and symmetry of its form, harmoniously fitting the space. No doubt generations of past students of BAHS and others will recall their days on the playing field as well as the shade of that tree, always green even in drought, and beyond, the Northern Range and the Queen’s Park Savannah, now both much disfigured.

There are many samaan trees in the country but most are ill-shaped in some way, being either too close to electricity lines, roads or buildings, or by storm damage. The only other comparable specimen was one on the St Augustine Campus to the southwest of the administration building, now also gone. Possibly there are others like these surviving somewhere in the country but I can assure you that if they exist they will in an open space and may cover more than an acre of ground. Trees like these demonstrate what I suggest is a perfect fit to their environments.

And what do we have now in this once open space that once housed the Princess Building, the Royal Victoria Institute, the Colonial tennis courts and that beautifully symmetrical samaan? The Royal Victoria Institute remains, like an old Dickensian curiosity shop and a sad excuse for a National Museum and Art Gallery. Now there is the Academy of Performing Arts, supposedly ’reminiscent’ of the national flower, the single chaconier. But in the eyes of others something rather different, with one distinguished member of the performing arts community openly comparing it to gigantic mating snails.

We will all have to live with the new landmark and whatever one may think of the design it is well to remember that architecture is very much a fusion of art, design and innovative engineering, with the architects conceiving structures that fit harmoniously to purpose, to the site and surrounding buildings and particularly to space. Possibly others may not share my view which is that the buildings simply do not fit the site and I doubt that any T&T architect would have come up with a design that is so unsuited for a site.

A more appropriate location might have been on reclaimed land on the foreshore or even the Caroni plain where space would have permitted the surrounds needed for this type of structure.

And whatever the aesthetics of the design, it incongruously and gratingly shares space with that excrescence of the National Museum and Art Gallery and certainly seems much out of place in this part of the capital city, a product of the design-build model coupled with the pharaoh complex, Mr. Manning having proudly claimed that we have built it. Others might argue that we simply bought a structure on hire purchase, as we buy so many other Chinese products, and with borrowed Chinese money and Chinese indentured labour to boot.

If there are lessons to be learnt from this matter certainly the most important is that in our densely populated islands where space is at a premium extreme care must be given to planning national infrastructure and that local professionals, particularly architects, must be deeply involved in the planning processes. We really do need an independent National Physical Planning Commission. Moreover, the users of such infrastructure must also have major inputs. Port of Spain has however become a thorough mish-mash of a jumble of structures of diverse unrelated forms with an internal network of narrow congested roads and decrepit sidewalks with an enormous spider’s web tangle of overhead lines, in the process of which it has certainly lost identity, at least in my view, its only remaining defining feature being the Savannah, now under official assault and continuous degradation.

Any administration with any sense of aesthetics, environmental sensitivity, and especially vision for the future, would have preserved all our open green spaces left to us by our forbears. Instead we have an expensive architectural bauble that will also shed volumes of water somewhere onto the streets of Port of Spain.

I have walked by the academy frequently in the last year on my way to securing a new passport, passing down Frederick Street by the Royal Victoria Institute, originally named after Queen Elizabeth’s great grandmother and further down Frederick Street the Royal Jail built by government slaves before emancipation, a structure that the late Eric Williams planned to convert to a polytechnic over 50 years ago, now a polytechnic of criminality, both part of Commonwealth history. Will these be pointed out to Her Majesty?

Curiously there is a mature strangler fig tree slowly killing one of the large trees in front of the new structure. Ironic.