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The church then and now |
Secondly. when you are looking at the St. Gabriel Church you have to look beyond its facade,
its outward appearance, its skin as conservators would call it; and when you look beyond the surface
you find the bones and relic of a rare eighteenth century building form. This is where we begin to
interpret the building and see what is most significant about it. When you look past the surface you
find this rare eighteenth century form. With some detective work you can piece back what this
building originally looked like and you can come up with a form that has come to be called Creole
architecture. Now we [must] define what Creole architecture means. The word Creole is subject to
many interpretations.
The one we are looking at here, is something that was born of Louisiana, or
born of a native area or place evolving out of an earlier tradition.
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Model of the trusswork |
We have European traditions
coming to this new world and a new form evolves. So in the case of architecture you had the French
come to Louisiana and they had a style and tradition that was familiar to them in France but it didn't
work here because the climate was different. We have a subtropical climate here. They had already
been in the tropics in the West Indies. You also had other cultures coming together there in that
place and so we begin to get into the other connotations of the word Creole which comes to mean
"mix." That occurred as well. You had different cultures coming together in a new place. Some
anthropologists have suggested that the architectural form that evolved out of this European model
had some African influence.
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