Beauty only belongs to the one who understands it, not to the one who has it.1
—Carlos Fuentes
The concept of beauty in the discipline of architecture is generally tied to the aesthetics of the functional. Historically, styles, fashions, and designs have developed that reflect cultures, traditions, and religions. That which is perceived or understood as “beautiful” has varied over time, since the definition of beauty is always at the mercy of particular historical and social formations, as well as of class conflict. Thus, beauty conceptually transcends the individual, and is a collective matter. Given that architecture is responsible for creating spaces and experiences for society, privileging visual gratification based on an aesthetic concept of beauty doesn’t only thwart and limit the potential appreciation of these spaces, it also signifies an absence of truth and purpose as much for the architect as for the communities they serve. Architecture can powerfully contribute to social struggles and dedicate itself to a desired future. A different understanding of the concept of beauty can elevate and emphasize the political power within the discipline of architecture.
As an architectural professional born in Vieques, I have focused my work and scholarship on a close study of the conditions that make me such a rarity in this field. Taking social factors into consideration, I have created philosophical, conceptual exercises that explore the definition of beauty as a means of contributing to the fight for social justice and the future of my home, Vieques—a small island to the east of Puerto Rico with a rich and powerful history that is today, regrettably, mostly forgotten and abandoned. The historical and social evolution of this Caribbean island demonstrates how the concept of beauty has oscillated and been defined by invasions, conflicts, and resistance. From all of this, what remains are architectural ruins. Vieques is a tourist destination for its warm and remote beaches. However, Vieques’ beauty doesn’t end at its beaches. Its beauty lies in the deep truth of the island.
Three Historical Philosophies of Beauty
Even though he never dedicated himself to the study of aesthetics, Plato connects aesthetics with metaphysics and ethics. In his text, “The Symposium,” Plato writes: “a man’s life should be spent … in the contemplation of absolute beauty.”2 For Plato, that which is beautiful doesn’t only appeal to the senses, but also necessarily includes aspects of morality, justice, science, and politics. Thus, he believed humanity has three inherent traits: beauty, goodness, and truth. Modern and contemporary philosophy has insisted on separating these terms but, for Plato, what is beautiful is good and true; goodness is true and beautiful; and truth is beautiful and good.
For Aristotle, conversely, everything is defined by its purpose, and even though there may be a hierarchy within that, in the end all functionality is good. Hence, what is beautiful is the utmost expression of utility directed toward goodness. According to Aristotle, what distinguishes human beings from other beings is not only that we rationalize, but that we communicate what we think we know about ourselves to other humans. Aristotle thus identifies the principal attributes that arise from our rationality: first is a preoccupation with morality, the search for or interest in goodness; second is sociability, communicating our feelings and thoughts to our neighbors; and third is politics, through which community is created in the search for the common good. The most elevated type of community—and that which makes us beautiful as human beings—is the political community. According to Aristotle, we are beautiful when we engage in politics; when we feel, think, and react to our surroundings and truth.3
According to Marx, beauty is found in the natural world.4 From whatever provenance, beauty has the capacity to “call forth from man selfless love and feelings of joy and liberty.”5 Conversely, according to Marxist aesthetics, beauty cannot be reduced to the natural characteristics of the object, but is aided by materialism. Marx also speaks of the beauty of social practices and the results of historical-social human achievements. As such, that which has meaning for human life and existence is beautiful. This doesn’t mean beauty is rooted in the usefulness of an object; rather, it is an act beyond what is considered valuable. Within this concept of beauty Marx includes the product of certain human activities like work, the search for truth in understanding, and “the fight against forces that oppose one’s beliefs.”6 Which is to say, human beings elevated by their moral qualities, and the maximum expression thereof, are beautiful. What is beautiful in society is therefore everyone maximally expressing their truth, which results from their striving toward progress. In addition, Marx defines the beautiful in art as all that faithfully reflects the historical context of the moment and demonstrates the “cardinal interests of the people,” vanguard thinking, and mastery of the medium, whether it’s painting, sculpture, literature, and/or architecture.7 What’s beautiful in art is its truth.
The History of Vieques
The history of the island of Vieques confers it a singular value within the Caribbean. Part of Puerto Rico’s archipelago, Vieques was the first island to be colonized by Europeans. The island’s name comes from its oldest inhabitants, the Taíno, who named the island Bieké, meaning “small earth.”8 The island was practically empty during the sixteenth century, after the conquest and eradication of the Taíno people at the hands of Christopher Mendoza, First Officer of the Inquisition in America. While the main island of Puerto Rico was being colonized by the Spanish, Vieques was exploited and populated intermittently by the English and Danish as a port of entry to the Puerto Rican islands. The majority of its inhabitants at that time came from the English island Tortola. In 1800, the governor of Puerto Rico, Don Salvador Melendez, wrote about Vieques in a letter to the Crown of Spain to explain its usefulness and vindicate the Crown’s interests in la Isla Nena. (In other words: to take it from the English and Danish and claim it as part of Puerto Rican territory)
It is nine leagues long and two wide. Its terrain is fertile, bearing in its breast ravines and lakes of salt. It produces tropical birds, great seafood, the turtle from which the hawksbill comes, and enormous crabs, but above all excellent timbers which supply the construction of mills, buildings, and ships in the surrounding islands, Denmark, and England … The major port, and the place most appropriate for establishing a colony, seems to be the port called Mulas.
Mulas is the only port on Vieques still in operation today. When the Spanish won the diplomatic dispute for the island, they urgently needed to urbanize it, which they did. In that process of urbanization, Don Juan Roselló, Don Teófilo José Jaime María Le Guillou, and Rafael de Aristegui y Vélez all contributed to the political, economic, and urban development of the island.
The layout of the island is laden with absolutist symbology and morphologically designed as political propaganda. All of the views are oriented toward the Fort of Vieques, which gives cohesion to the settlement. This fort, named after Rafael Aristegui y Velez, II Conde de Mirasol, has a design that mimics the form of the crown of King Fernando IV, and the main gazebo at the center of the town square was shaped like the queen’s crown. Everything is strategically located to be viewed directly from the port. It’s uncertain which came first, the fort or the urban design of the north of the island, which faces the commercial maritime route from San Juan to Saint Thomas. Regardless, the island’s arrangement, routes, views, and uses were oriented and manipulated such that whoever entered or left the island understood the absolute power of the Spanish monarchy.
As the military and political governor of the Spanish island of Vieques, Le Guillou developed new laws and liberal economic treaties that, even while slavery was in decline in the Americas, attracted dozens of French landowners from the nearby islands to establish large sugar mills reliant on enslaved labor. This explains the extensive French influence on the vernacular residential architecture of Vieques, the names of streets, districts, and neighborhoods, and even the local language, systems, and customs. The labor market was composed of local criollos—people from various English colonies, enslaved people, ex-formerly enslaved people, and descendants of enslaved people. The majority of the contemporary population of Vieques descends from people who were brought to build and/or work on these sugar mills.
Back then, the south of Vieques was economically independent from the north. While the north was under Spanish military control, the south was controlled by smugglers selling valuable lumber to the Danes on other islands, the fruit and food they harvested, and contraband from robberies of ships on the trade route. These smugglers are important to the history of Vieques, as they were not mere thieves. What Eric Hobsbawm calls “social bandits,” these people were more than simply peasants breaking the law: they were seen by their communities as heroes, saviors, social justice fighters, and even liberation leaders.9 By smashing the system and incarnating freedom, they awakened feelings of solidarity, cooperation, and resistance in their compatriots.
On July 25, 1898, the USA invaded Puerto Rico; the Navy subjected the island to a sea blockade until September of that year, when soldiers took the Fort of Vieques. Between toasts and hugs with evangelical pastors, US soldiers raised their flag to expel the Spanish from the island once and for all, and to make it clear to residents who was in charge from that moment forward.
Due to falling prices and lack of protection by the US government, Vieques’s sugar industry—which had produced for the island such extraordinary wealth that it was known as “the cup of gold”—diminished until 1927, when the final crop was harvested in Central Esperanza, in the south of Vieques. Around that time, locals revolted constantly and violently, demanding better pay, better treatment, and a shorter workday. Activists, revolutionaries, and organizers visited Vieques, including Luisa Capetillo as a supporter of workers’ rights, as well as Pedro Albizu Campos and Don Juan Antonio Corretjer, who attended the first assembly of women nationalists in all of Puerto Rico, at which they commended the workers’ struggles and denounced the dangers of the Navy’s presence.
A Mark 82 500-lb. bomb, dropped by a 926th Tactical Fighter Group A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft, explodes on Vieques Range during exercise Patriot Pearl in 1988.
In the 1940s, the US Navy expropriated 26,000 of the 33,000 acres of the territory of Vieques. They tried to adapt the urban model imposed by the Spanish to one that would be simpler and more practical (for them)—militarizing and impoverishing without beauty. This was part of their attempt to turn the entire island into a contingency base for the US Navy. Over the next sixty years, Vieques would be used by the US Navy to practice military exercises and test weapons and equipment. As a result, the majority of families on Vieques were forced to surrender their land and relocate to land designated by the US military. These expropriations forced the closing of the last and main sugar mill, “Playa Grande,” and compelled the emigration of thousands of families to the US, Saint Croix, and the main island of Puerto Rico in search of work and better conditions. Some refused to leave, however, and fought the Navy’s “Dracula Plan,” which ultimately sought to displace the entire population.10 Demonstrations by residents and workers began in 1943 and grew over the years, demanding work and social justice from a hamstrung local government. Those who stayed suffered bombing by the US Navy for sixty years, as well as the resultant heavy metal pollution.
During these six decades, the population of Vieques became concentrated on one third of its territory, in the center of the island. There, with the economy left in shambles, these people, alongside their community and their architecture, were suspended in time. As the sound of the bombs became part of our environment, the people of Vieques looked inward. Looking to the sea, we saw our oppressor destroying our resources; maybe that’s why our houses have their backs to the sea. Our buildings were never reached by modernity, as the Navy restricted the height and size of our settlements and our government abandoned us to luck.
On the evening of April 19, 1999, David Sanes was working as a watchman in the US Navy Observation Point building when a jet miscalculated and dropped a bomb on the East base, killing him. His death triggered the biggest civil protest in the history of Puerto Rico. Locals invaded the military practice grounds and began a series of protest encampments. They started demanding a ceasefire and the retirement of the US Navy base on the island. During that time, my family moved to a small cay inside the bombing area. Our camp was named Colectivo Cayo La Yayí. We spent a year protesting there. We were mostly Viequenses, but we received people in solidarity from all over the world; Vieques received support from thousands of boricuas and foreigners in the island’s decisive fight against the US Navy. There were many important camps like Monte David (named after Sanes), the camp of Ruben Berrios (president of the Independence party), and Los Hostocianos, which was mostly made up of lawyers, teachers, and professors. There was even a religious camp, which included different churches in solidarity to the cause.
It wasn’t until May 2003 that military exercises on Vieques were ended.11 The US Navy finally ceased bombing, defeated by the people of Vieques. But the land remains largely in federal hands. Contaminated, it still awaits a process of “cleaning” and remediation that has yet to arrive. Certain beaches and lands were given back to the people of Vieques that we hadn’t had access to for decades. The Navy also left us military buildings that are today ignored as ruins. As a result, our tourism began to grow anarchically, without direction, without plan. Visitors today arrive in search of those resources that the governor described to the Spanish Crown in 1800: this marine diet, these virgin landscapes and beaches, and, above all, an undeveloped native people: an escape from the modern city full of its noises, its grind, and its vehicles, to a shining, abandoned paradise. Indeed, a recent review published in an international travel magazine described the island as “the most romantic” of the Caribbean for its singular tranquility, resources, and welcoming attitude toward the LGBTQ+ community.12 None of these descriptions from the colonizers, then or now, do justice to what makes Vieques beautiful, which is its people. People who have defeated Empire; political beings seeking the common good. Goodness and truth.
Photo of the author as a child.
A Viequense Architect
I live in San Juan because there are no jobs for me in Vieques, there is no new construction. Now that I am in my thirties, my primary fear has become returning home. Returning home to Vieques empty-handed, with nothing to give to my people. I’ve constructed this thought exercise to demonstrate how, from within my profession, I can be political and act directly for social justice and for our common good. I dream of the day when we can all enjoy our currently damaged lands and be part of a design process that highlights our beauty and truth. Just as architecture was instrumental in the oppression and art of Empire, architecture today can focus on the true beauty of humans and serve the community. Architecture is an instrument of political community, a means to reach our maximum potential as human beings. For the writer José Saramago, to know a place means to understand, in the most specific way possible, its landscape, its culture, its people, and their history.13 This separates the “traveler” from the “tourist”: to travel means to discover, while to be a tourist is only to encounter or stumble upon something. Vieques must not become a tourist paradise, but a destination for travelers.
We have a true history different from the imperialist perspective that appears in books. Our history of resistance makes us beautiful, which is what those of us who survived tell anyone who will listen. We have resisted Empire, militarism, and bombs. What makes us beautiful is our truth and our community in resistance, what makes us beautiful are all of the expressions of how we have inhabited this little piece of land. With our indigenous people, our criollos, our smugglers, our religion, and our dead, we continue resisting. This is the beauty of Vieques that the world needs to know.
Carlos Fuentes, En esto creo (Mexico: Seix Barral, 2002), 313.
Plato, The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 211, d1-3.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, chapter 2.
I. Blauberg, Diccionario Marxista de Filosofía (Mexico City: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1972).
Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 21.
It’s worth mentioning that the Taino were eradicated by European invaders at the inception of the colonization of “America.” However, we still maintain their names, memories, and DNA in our veins.
Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969).
The plan’s name came from its ambition to remove and relocate even the buried dead from the cemeteries to the main island, so that the people would not even have the excuse of their dead, nor their memory, to return to the island.
As a result of an executive order issued by President Bill Clinton in 2001.
Robyn Wilson, “This remote Puerto Rico island is an idyllic Caribbean getaway – pristine beaches, lush rainforest and artisan rum,” Independent, June 20, 2024, ➝.
José Saramago, Viaje a Portugal (Círculo de Leitores e Editorial Caminho, 1981).
Loudreading is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, WAI Architecture Think Tank, and Loudreaders Trade School supported by the Mellon Foundation, re:arc institute, the Graham Foundation, Producer Hub, Iowa State University, GSA Johannesburg, Universidad de Puerto Rico–Rio Piedras, and the inaugural ACSA Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture.
