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valuable Bermudian paintings have been totally destroyed. As a result, more and more
galleries and exhibition rooms on the island have installed air-conditioning.
In addition to its painters, Bermuda also boasts several noted sculptors, including
Chelsey Trott, who produces cedar-wood carvings, and Desmond Hale Fountain, who
creates works in bronze. Fountain's life-size statues often show children in the act of
reading or snoozing in the shade.
Architecture
Today, Bermuda's unique style is best represented by its architecture: primarily, those
darling little pink cottages that grace postcards. The architecture of the island—a
mélange of idiosyncratic building techniques dictated by climate and the types of
building materials available—is the archipelago's only truly indigenous art form.
Bermuda's early settlers quickly recognized the virtues of the island's most visible
building material, coral stone. A conglomerate of primeval sand packed with crushed
bits of coral and shells, this stone has been quarried for generations on Bermuda. Cut
into oblong building blocks, it is strong yet porous. However, it would be unusable in
any area where the climate has cycles of freezing and thawing, because it would
crack. Mortared together with imported cement, the blocks provide solid and durable
foundations and walls.
Bermuda's colonial architects ingeniously found a way to deal with a serious prob-
lem on the island: the lack of an abundant supply of fresh water. During the construc-
tion of a house or any other sort of building, workers excavated a water tank, or
cistern, first. The cistern was created either as a separate underground cavity away
from the house or as a foundation for the building. These cisterns served to collect
rainwater funneled from rooftops via specially designed channels and gutters. The
design of these roof-to-cellar water conduits led to the development of what is Ber-
muda's most distinct architectural feature: the gleaming rooftops of its houses. Gently
sloping, and invariably painted a dazzling white, they are constructed of quarried
limestone slabs sawed into “slates” about an inch thick and between 77 and 116 sq.
cm (12-18 sq. in.). Roofs are installed over a framework of cedar-wood beams (or,
more recently, pitch pine or pressure-treated wood beams), which are interconnected
with a series of cedar laths. The slates are joined together with cement-based mortar
in overlapping rows, then covered with a cement wash and one or several coats of
whitewash or synthetic paint. This process corrects the porosity of the coral limestone
slates, rendering them watertight. The result is a layered effect, since each panel of
limestone appears in high relief atop its neighbor. The angular, step-shaped geometry
of Bermudian roofs has inspired watercolorists and painters to emphasize the rhyth-
mically graceful shadows that trace the path of the sun across the rooflines.
Unlike those in the
Caribbean, Bermudian
houses are designed with-
out amply proportioned
hanging eaves. Large
eaves may be desirable
because of the shade they
afford, but smaller ones
have proved to be more
structurally sound during
A typical roof in Bermuda.
2
 
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