modernity | havana by vivian manasc
cuban modernism the benefits of peace
revolution stabi l ity restoration necessity tourism
Havana modern
brought a building boom of modern skyscrapers, Old Havana was seen as uninteresting, housing those not lucky enough to be connected to the lucrative world of American-style casinos, gambling, tourists, shows and prostitution. Palaces, churches and colonial mansions crumbled around old squares. Along the sea-sprayed Malecon, fine houses were eaten by the salt air. When the Revolution entered its second phase after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba lost its market for sugar cane and turned again to tourism. In the last 15 years, tourism has been made a priority, recognising the value of the historic city. Entire blocks of the old City have been restored for cultural, historic and touristic purposes. The historic fabric of the old City has value for the future. Cuba’s modernist buildings, interesting sidewalks and historic squares have not yet been widely recognised for their significance to the architectural history of Cuba. Outside of Miami and perhaps Tel Aviv, Cuba likely has the world’s best remaining collection of 1950’s modern architecture. As the restoration of major colonial buildings progresses through Havana, Trinidad and Santiago de Cuba, the next step is to restore the experimental but vulnerable concrete shell structures of the 1950’s when the new and the modern defined Havana in villas, pavilions in parks, hotels, resorts and gas stations. When Americans flew to Havana for fun, there was money, imagination and opportunity to experiment and show off what could be built with new building technology. Between 1950 and 1958, hundreds of modern buildings were built all over Cuba. Architecture celebrated the possible – Coppelita ice cream is sold from a modern concrete pavilion with a large round cafeteria that hovers over a small base – soaring ramps fly you up to enjoy the delights of the treat. Maybe the future is different than we imagined in 1958, but it still seems hopeful. Today’s Havana is a testament to the optimism of the Cuban people, 50 years after the Revolution. C
In 1959 Havana was transformed from a playground for the world’s rich and famous, a magnet for all that was good and beautiful – and all that was ugly and corrupt – to a city at the heart of America’s first Socialist Revolution. Cuba’s pre-revolutionary, optimistic architecture – exuberant buildings with flying ramps and folded-plate roofs, concrete thin-shell wide-span arches and glass buildings displaying modern art was often requisitioned for the revolution. The Hilton Hotel, designed in 1958 by Welton Becket and Associates of Los Angeles, opened in Havana in March of 1958, at the time the tallest building in Latin America and a dramatic modernist landmark. In 1959 it was requisitioned for Fidel Castro’s revolutionary headquarters and renamed the Habana Libra. It stands as a monument to what the future was to be and never became. Thinking about the effect of political and social regimes on our cities, as I wandered through Prague and Vienna recently, I was struck once again by the question of whether revolution, or socialism, or war, caused or affected the architecture of a given region. In eastern Europe the modern was banished after the communist revolution, and only social realism was permitted as artistic expression. Modernism in many ways went underground. Both war and revolution causes a shift in values; the image of modernism that we all often associate with CIAM and socialism, actually belongs to a different ideology – a ‘bourgeois’ sensitivity. Modernism belongs, more and more, it seems, to a time of plenty and of optimism. In revolution and war the focus on the modern in many ways vanishes. The value placed on architecture, on design and on the importance of the aesthetic to the well-being of the new modern man/woman is only possible in times of peace. The Cuban Revolution, it seems, put an end to Cuban Modernism – or at least an end to the designs of the world to serve the modern jet-set elite. It was the start of other things – the start of an educated and healthy community across the country and the start of a period of 50 years when almost nothing was built. Even before the Revolution, the grand colonial capital city and harbour of Havana, its 400-year legacy of imposing stone and masonry buildings reflecting a history of trade and piracy, had been neglected for years as business shifted west. While the 1950’s
Vivian Manasc is a partner in Manasc Isaac Architects in Edmonton. In January 2009 she was in Havana for the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution. More recently, she was in Prague, Vienna and points east.
56 On Site review 22: WAR
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