By Frances Anderton, The New York Times
October 7, 1999
HAVANA -- If one thinks of architecture in Cuba today, it is of splendid but decaying Colonial buildings floating like the ghosts of grand dowagers through the movie "Buena Vista Social Club." Or the freshly primped, restored buildings in Old Havana. Visitors will also find the capital
bursting with 20th-century buildings in a spirited Cuban fusion of international and tropical styles: Art Deco movie theaters, streamline Moderne apartments, sassy 1950s hotels in Morris Lapidus Modern and, crowning them all, the Expressionist art schools of the '60s, once as ripe as mangoes in
their sensuality and revolutionary spirit.
But where is the attention-seeking new architecture, the kind that has graced the global architectural stage in the last 20 years? It is mostly nonexistent.
The last three decades have seen Cuba's amazing architectural heritage yield to the utilitarian and architects recede into the shadows. As Julio Cesar Perez, a professor of design at Jose Antonio Echeverria City University in Havana, put it, "There is no Michael Graves here, no Frank Gehry,
no Philip Johnson."
There is no machinery promoting new architects and new buildings. Architects work for state firms, largely on mundane tourist structures. The few who work on individual commissions often do not attach their names publicly to the projects so as not to call attention to themselves.
With state salaries of roughly $15 a month, Cuba's architects have had little wherewithal to dream. They can barely afford to make blueprints or take taxis to the building site, let alone buy foreign architecture magazines. They must deal with shortages of materials and poor craftsmanship.
But in recent months, a generation of Cuban architects pressing for change say they are scenting the whiff of a renaissance. A modish new restaurant, A Prado y Neptuno, designed by Roberto Gottardi, opened early this year in Old Havana. A striking new hotel, the Packard, fusing a masonry base
with a sleek steel roof and a huge exterior ceramic mural, is to be built nearby, by two talented young architects, Oscar Garcia, 36, and Teresa Martin, 32. A remodeling of a bank on swank Fifth Avenue will offer a lively cocktail of tapering roof, curving elevations and sloping canopies that echo
the Los Angeles school of sculptural design. A once-influential magazine, Arquitectura Cuba, has restarted.
"There was a void between the late '60s and Gottardi's new restaurant, but now, there is something in the air in the architectural mood," said Emilio Castro, an architect and graphic artist whose wall designs adorn A Prado y Neptuno.
In general, the state has taken the view that "we don't want to insert new buildings into Old Havana until architects develop the right sensibility," said Gina Rey, director of the Group for the Integral Development of Havana, an urban planning authority. Its philosophy was "save
first, then bring in the new," Ms. Rey added. But with the approval of the Hotel Packard this week, and a thumbs up for A Prado y Neptuno in the state newspaper, Granma, contemporary architecture seems to be getting a government endorsement.
In a series of conversations with Emilio Castro and several other Cuban architects, they explained how over the last 30 years they saw the role of the architect change from artist-builder to technician. "It was not about style; it was about the whole structure of architectural practice,"
said Eduardo Luis Rodriguez, editor of Arquitectura Cuba and author of "Havana Guide: Modern Architecture, 1925-1965" ( Princeton Architectural Press in February).
After Fidel Castro took power in 1959, about two-thirds of Cuba's architects left the island, said Raul Gonzalez Romero, a professor at City University and a practicing architect since the 1950s. Those who chose to remain had to quit private practice to work for the state. In its exuberant early
years, the state commissioned poetic civic structures like the five art schools, which though decayed are open to the public today, and an ambitious social building program. Even now, Gonzalez's face lights up as he describes how in 1961, architecture students were sent into the field to work with
farmers on designing and building an agricultural cooperative.
But by the late 1960s, a few years after the abrupt termination of the arts schools (originally commissioned by Fidel Castro and designed by Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garatti and Gottardi), the government ceased to commission artistic civic architecture.
Twenty years of mass construction of much needed pre-fabricated social housing, schools and libraries followed. Architecture education during this era focused on practical, problem-solving projects and very little on the art of design. "We had 40 hours of instruction in space, form and
color in five years," Ms. Martin, a recent architecture graduate, said.
After the opening of Cuba to foreign investment at the end of the Cold War, a decade of bland international hotels and convention and shopping centers followed. They now employ 90 percent of Cuba's architects, Ms. Martin estimated, but the assignments offer little chance for a personal style.
Many architects still become frustrated and leave. Ana Karakadze, 25, a Cuban interior designer who worked on hotels in the tourist sea resort of Varadero before bolting for Miami six months ago, said she found that "when you try to be individual" the state firms that deal with the
investors "start saying no."
"You've got to do what the foreign people want you to do," Ms. Karakadze added. "You start feeling like you are a foreigner in your own country."
Ms. Karakadze, who now works in Coral Gables, Fla., says she believes many Cuban architects who have left feel as she does, "that in Cuba you don't have perspective or hope because you always have to do what the government says." She added, "Even to buy doors the government has to
decide."
But others who have stayed are feeling the winds of change. They point to A Prado y Neptuno on the ground floor of a late 19th-century building on the patrician Paseo del Prado. It was designed by Gottardi, 73, a gentle Italian who fell in love with the Socialist ideology of Cuba nearly 40 years
ago. He is probably best known for his design of the School of Dramatic Arts, an intriguing "city" of spare, Louis Kahn-like structures in a network of slender alleyways reminiscent of his native Venice.
A Prado y Neptuno was the brainchild of Eusebio Leal, famed city historian and director of the restoration of Old Havana. It is owned by Habaguanex, the Cuban enterprise that is financing the restoration of Old Havana -- including a pending remodeling of a 1906 Catalonian Art Nouveau building by
Emilio Castro -- with the profits from its restaurants and hotels. An Italian co-investor, Arsia International, commissioned Gottardi.
Though modest compared with the groundbreaking art schools, A Prado y Neptuno offers a modern interior in a historic district. Dining areas are decked out in a lively eclecticism that Gottardi says is part of the Cuban tradition. There are Macintosh-inspired chairs in the dining room, Roy
Lichtenstein look-alike panels by Emilio Castro in the bathroom.
A mural of Gottardi's favorite designers cheekily places Philippe Starck, Frank Lloyd Wright, Carlo Scarpa, Charles Rennie Macintosh and Louis Kahn center stage (it includes his own likeness as a young man).
Down the road at the corner of Paseo del Prado and Carcel is the site of the Packard Hotel, by Garcia and Ms. Martin for the state firm Maceo. The two, who earn $15 a month each no matter how large the project, still believe themselves to be among the lucky beneficiaries of a slowly changing
system. Garcia said, "Money is welcome, but more important is to try to make contemporary architecture."
Where the Packard Hotel is the project of a state firm, Garcia's and Ms. Martin's other project, the Banco Financiero Internacional, came to them personally from the National Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba, a state association that includes selected architects. ( Garcia and Ms. Martin were
invited to be members this week.) The union can hand out plum assignments to favorite architects.
Cuban and foreign businesses sometimes enter into arrangements with cultural institutions, like the union. These institutions will enlist an artist or architect who may get paid an unregulated fee but does not always attach his or her name publicly to the project.
These arrangements result in the odd situation where architects of some of the most adventurous new designs are keeping quiet about their involvement, even concealing the location of the project.
Yet, this system of cultural sponsorship, even if architects often remain anonymous, is countering 30 years of big, bad building by the Construction Ministry and, Garcia says, letting a few architects contribute to "the cultural patrimony."
One architect took a reporter to see his new building in a town away from Havana that he asked not to be identified. Suffused in the peach halo of a rainy sunset was the skeleton, the size of a large bungalow.
The architect concealed the building's real purpose -- a church, built with private financing. Rather than go through the process of trying to get a rare government permit, he called it a residence and configured it like a house, hoping for a "change of use" permit down the line.
The architect has neither signed the drawings nor kept them in his possession. No, thank you, the project cannot be published in the United States.
Perez of the City University says the reason for this re-emergence of a more confident architectural voice is the 1980s generation of graduates, who are more questioning than their Cold War forbears.
Perez is rare in that he has his own office and designs private houses. "Designing private residences is kind of rare in Cuba," he said, "because they typify the architecture of capitalism."
But in his hometown, San Antonio de los Banos, outside Havana, Perez has built a string of houses for friends that are variations on the traditional Cuban courtyard homes, in poured concrete and concrete block rather than of stone or brick.
Perez is also part of a group calling for the preservation of Havana beyond the boundaries of the Old Havana district, especially of the arts schools, presently disintegrating in a sea of tropical vegetation. The most optimistic architects still want to pursue careers in their country.
Gottardi lives in a crumbling concrete slab building from the early 1970s. His small apartment is lined with architecture books, pictures of his wife, who is a dancer, and Che Guevara. He said that while the lack of maintenance of his buildings is frustrating, creatively, he is satisfied in
Cuba. "There are many things that are not about consumerism," he said, adding, "I need other things that I find here."
On a warm September evening, Gottardi was having drinks at Prado y Neptuno with Garcia and Ms. Martin, his former students, in front of a green and purple neon installation that celebrates the enganadora, a famous cha-cha that begins with the line "A Prado y Neptuno." They must raise
their voices to compete with that of Fidel Castro, delivering a speech on the loud overhead television.
The restaurant, a part of the dollar economy of Havana, is at an intersection of the city that sees grand, patched-together, pre-revolution Chevrolets and post-revolution Ladas parade by in the daytime. Tonight, in their place, are shiny European, Korean and Japanese compact cars, the property
of Cuban officials, or those who have been granted permission to buy them.
For architects like Gottardi, Garcia and Ms. Martin, it is a place where their power, perhaps even their blood, is seeping back into architecture.
"We are trying to find a space in the culture," Garcia said.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company |