BUILDERS

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22389, 30 April 1938, Page 18

BUILDERS

NEW BEAUTY FROM OLD RUINS

The House in Antigua. By Louis Adamic. Victor Gollancz Ltd. 317 pp. (15/- net.)

Antigua is a ruined city in Guatemala. Guatemala is a republic in Central America with a population of two and a half millions, of whom more than half are Indians. The industries are mining, rubber, and the growing of coffee, bananas, and sugar cane. On the Pacific coast are cattle estates. Pedro de Alvarado conquered Guatemala for the Spaniards in 1523, and Antigua became one of the finest cities in Latin America, with a strong culture, a fine architecture, and a thriving trade. In 1773 the last of a number of severe -earthquakes caused -the abandonment of the city, and it was left to the Indians, who gradually returned and established amid the ruins their own culture with a slight admixture of European ways. Within a decade following the catastrophe, and especially during the rainy season, tall and luscious grasses grew all through the vast ruins of the Franciscan church and monastery, as well as in ether great ruins: and what could have been more natural and sensible than for sheep and cattle to be driven in for pasture? An' enterprising soap manufacturer opened a factory in the sacristy of the church of La Recolecion. When business increased, he spread out into a wing of the church proper that still had a roof. A one-time patio of the same ruined edifice was used as a corral, while the skeleton of the Santa Rosa Church became a* superb cow barn.

To Antigua there came in 1927 Wilson and Dorothy Popenoe. Wilson Popenoe is a gifted botanist serving the United Fruit Company. His journeys carried him through Latin America, and he saw that, as well as working for his employers, he could do something for the economic future of the country, which, as he said, depended on the rational development of its latent agricultural resources. His wife, also an enthusiastic botanist, became an even more zealous archaeologist. Gradually their absorption in the past and future of Guatemala led them to decide to live there; and they determined to restore a wrecked house in Antigua. The task seemed enormous, the materials inadequate, and the craftsmen unpromising. But the Americans communicated their energy and ardour to their helpers, and art came to wait upon labour. In a series of admirable photographs, the grace and strength of the completed house can be perceived. The slow recovery of possible materials, the reconstruction of window grilles, the building of the pillars of the patio, the planning of the gardens, and the designing of fit furniture were tasks relatively easy compared with the courage and labour of first clearing and then laying bare the shattered ruins. Mrs Popenoe died just after the house was finished. The story of <such an enterprise would be irresistible to a writer like Louis Adamic, who looks for evidence first of good intentions end then of useful effort. The house in Antigua is a monument to both. Before telling the story of its restoration, with extracts from the diaries of Dorothy Popenoe, Mr Adamic has recounted the four centuries of Antigua's history. The book is pleasant to read, and, unpretentious as it is, gives a ; strong impression of the forces of Mature and of man.