Page 3 of 3

      
***
       
The Cuba Moderne Architecture. 
                

       Helen Malkin is the assistant director for exhibitions and publications  of the Canadian
Center of Architecture in Montreal. In l998 she was given a tour of the Havana's Cuba Moderne heritage by Eduardo Luiz Rodriguez, its foremost champion, who is dedicated to bringing back the moderne and rescuing  it from its decadent rep (or rap) and is the author of Modern Architecture in Cuba  . "The colonial  is incredible, but what really knocked me out was the modernist stuff from the 20s to the 50s," she says, echoing my sentiments precisely.. Part of the old city got UNESCO World Heritage Site designation five years ago, so that will help [although no actual restoration has happened so far except in the small section where the Patrimonio Architectural is headquartered. Most of the Habana Viejo looks like Dresden after the war or as if it had been leveled by a neutron bomb]. Havana is  crumbling, in such a state of disrepair it's amazing but certain buildings are still salveageable. They haven't targeted the moderne. Some of the hotels are great like Conrad Hilton's late moderne flagship Hilton which was taken over by Castro and is now known as the Havana Libre. Meyer Lansky divided his time between the Hotel Riviedra,   a real Deco hotel,  and the Club Tropicana. The Sevilla, which I inspected, is nothing to get excited about : reminiscent of  the flagship Hilton in Albuquerque, La Posada, and the old Best Western Hotel on the Zocalo in Mexico City. Lots of tile, architecturally more ersatz than uplifting.] 

     “Eduardo Luis Rodriguez is the editor of Architectura Magazine [or was at the time of
Malkin's visit. I was unable to confirm whether the magazine still exists.   I had gone to see the National School for the Arts that Castro commissioned from the Venezuelan
Ricardo Porro [and Vittorio Garretti] in the early 60s. By the mid-60s it was deemed decadent by the Russians. Of the 4 buildings two are ninety percent complete. One is so overgrown with trees [smothered with strangler figs roots that have dripped down the brick wall  like wax from a melted candle] it looks like a Piranezi ruin. It's in the country-club area [Cubanacan]. The dance and art buildings were converted from the old clubhouse. They're very expressionistic, phallic and phallopian, representing the clashing together of  old and the new that the revolution was bringing in."

      Apparently it was Che's idea to convert the Cubanacan Country Club into a national school for the arts for the children of the people. Che grew up in an impoverished family of  the Argentine oligarchy and caddied and golf as a boy and loved the game, but hated the  snobbery and class consciousness it engendered. There is a famous snapshots of
him in guerilla fatigues walking purposefully down one of Cubanacan's fairways to his shot with an iron in one hand.  So the conversion of the country club had a symbolic dimension for him.  Golf,  all the rage in Batista days and sometimes an occasion for good architecture, appears to have died with the revolution. Only one nine hole course, at Veradero, an hour and a half from Havana  (where there is also a Vanderbilt mansion on a bluff) was kept open for the foreign diplomatic corps. The Russians covered with fairways of Cubanacan with  soulless student housing. 

       Ernesto Luiz Rodriguez’s colleague,  Alina Ochoa Aloma, ended up showing me around. Aina is an architect who has spent the last fifteen years in preservation,  two of them years in the office of the historian of Havana, Eusebio Leal (a key figure who was out of town), and three years exclusively on the moderne heritage, which resulted in her co-authoring Arquitectura en la Ciudad de Habana : Primera Modernidad, Electa Press, Asturias, Spain, 2000. In which the 400 most important buildings are catalogued with foto, address, date, and architect. So she knows her Cuba moderne, and is definitely someone you could work with. 

      “Havana in the twenties and thirties was like Mexico City and Buenos Aires,” Alina told me.
      “Like Miami today,” I said, sticking my foot in my mouth again. 
       “I wouldn't know,” Alina replied drily.
       “It was a luxurious city, and the most technologically advanced in Latin America, and more advanced than many North American cities. It had a railroad system by 1827, electricity by l894, before Philadelphia, telephones by l941, color t.v. by l950, automatic tellers by l957. So modern architecture blossomed in this fertile, technologically sophisticated terrain. 

          “Most of Havana was built in the first half of the twentieth century. There has been very little construction since except for social housing. After the war, Havana continued to expand, but Caracas and Lima exploded more. By the forties and the fifties there was a large middle class, whom an abundance of very creative and talented architects was ready to serve. Their designs weren't only modern. There was also a flourishing Republican style from l902-59 [which there are numerous example of in Vedado but which is nowhere as interesting.] The middle class tried to copy the details of the colonial mansions of the rich a hundred years later. In the fifties we were starting to have high rises but this stopped with the revolution. There were other priorities.     

         “Most of the modern buildings are in the districts of Vedado and Miramar. Central Havana has 82, old Havana 24, Vedado 136, and Miramar, which part of La Playa, has 145, the best of which are in a once-chique section known as Las Alturas de Miramar.  They belong to what Alina classes as "first modernity," from art deco to early modern, 1924 to l950, with some spillover into the fifties.. The most important ones were designed by Rafael de Cardenas, Cristobal Diaz, Eugenio Batista [no relation to the  dictator], the firm of Mira y Rossitch, and Julio de la Torre's uncle Achilles Capablanca ["the guy with the bad heel white cape," as Julio translates his name. "He was one of the prime movers of the whole modernist movement and did many of the first modernist buildings in Cuba in the 30s. His maquettes and things have been exhibited at MOMA."] 

        “The first example is the l924 apartment building at Calzada y 9th. It's in bad shape and needs a lot of work. The Edificio Baccardi is one of the paradigmatic ones. Other particularly  outstanding examples include the apartments at Lopez Serrano l032, the l952 blue apartment building at Calzada 101-103 and 11th [which has a swimming pool in the center of the penthouse and can be glimpsed from the Avenida del Alecon, which runs along the ocean in Vedado; the  stadium, which has peeling, crumbling flair, too, is later, from the l960s], the apartment building at Galiano    478 (near Chinatown), the abandoned Cine Moderno at Diez de Outubre 365, the residencia Canteras Infanta 15-21, the moderne mausoleums in the pantheo of the principal cemetery (especially that of carnival star Catalina Laza), the l937 Edificio Santeiro (by Emilio de Soto, it anticipates the Guggenheim), the 1941 Edificio Triangula  between 23rd and Zapata (by Cristobal Diaz. It anticipates Frank Gehry). La rampa, the main drag of Vedado, which slopes down to the sea is where the moderne really took off in the 40s and 50s. Buildings of incomparable flare and delapidated  brio like the Ministry of Public Health, and the Alberto Prieto apartment building. Further west, up the Rampa, it gets more Republican. The closer to the sea, the more moderne, because the real estate was more expensive and much of the construction was done with American capital. The Partagas building is striking, but eclectic. The l941  Apartamento L y 25th has the deep, narrow central patio that is a signature of first modernity.  The l945 Cinema Arenal is completely deco. The l955 Gran Templo Masonico, by Emilio Vasconcelos, is one of the last first moderne works. Already by then the more rationalistic, less flamboyant second moderne movment,  was taking off,  spendid examples being the l949 Casa de Jose Noval Cueto in Miramar and the l951 Cabaret Tropical. The most important architects of this wave were Max Borges, Frank Martinez, and the firm of Bosch y Romanach. They were the last of the avant garde. 

      In the 30s and 40s the richest people lived on 5th Avenue in Miramar and in the Alturas
(which is, or was, the counterpart of   the Lomas district of Mexico City). The very rich, the aristocrats, went in for Florentine palaces. They looked to Europe, while the middle class looked to the States and commissioned Havana architects who took the moderne style to new heights.  In the 50s the very moved west to the country club area. The moderne stuff starts at 5th and 60th and continues to the end of the 5th, at 14th.

       There was so much to see that we drove around for three hours.  The funky futuristic time warp was accented by the old Chevvies and Buicks from the forties and fifties, Edsels and Cadillacs and fantastic luxury models I’d never seen before  that still make up the bulk of Havana's running automobile stock and exhibit the same retro deco flair in their grills
and tails and other flashy details as the moderne architecture.

             So there is a huge amount of good work to do in Cuba, but it isn't going to be at all easy.
 
 
 

Back to the Home Page
Visit the Dispatches Discussion Room
Send Comments and Questions to AlexShoumatoff@Shoumatopia.Com