Design Observer :: Join the Discussion http://places.designobserver.com/feature/beyond-national-art-schools-architecture-in-cuba/32018/ en-us Design Observer Group 2012-03-12T11:39:31-05:00 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0 http://places.designobserver.com/feature/beyond-national-art-schools-architecture-in-cuba/32018/#comments 2012-03-12T11:39:31-05:00 http://places.designobserver.com/feature/beyond-national-art-schools-architecture-in-cuba/32018/#comments 2012-03-11T15:31:21-05:00
At any rate, you give just praise to Antonio Quintana, who I felt was severely maligned in the film. For me, I have always enjoyed the articulation of the facade that he did for the Seguro Medico Building, and I had always understood that he continued part of the functionalist discourse that was already present in Cuba since the early post-war period. Do you know if he was involved in the urban planning of the late 50's as well? I haven't found any documentation of him dealing with Sert during his involvement in the National Plan with the JNP, but the buildings that he completed during that period - the Seguro Medico and the Edificio Odontologico always displayed strong influence from CIAM affiliated architects. Which leads me to the second question - do you know if Antonio Quintana was in any way affiliated with ATEC? Save for considerable mention of his individual buildings, I've never found anything that would tie his involvement in with urban planning and the larger modernist discourse at the time. Would this have implicated his involvement with the previous regime? (which the affiliation with the Junta Nacional de Planificacion probably did for other architects, considering that they all received their posts through official appointment). I've always wondered if there was a connection that was missing from the histories that Rodriguez or Segre have written. A new history (sort of....contains many of the old biases) came out a couple of years ago - De Forestier a Sert - have you seen it?]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/beyond-national-art-schools-architecture-in-cuba/32018/#comments 2012-03-03T19:46:05-05:00
However, I think Freeman misses the mark when he makes statements such as: “The architecture of ENA is seductive, but our North American obsession with its primitive nature betrays a disturbing trace of latent colonialism, condescension and — dare I say? — racism” or “Don’t try this kind of architecture here in the USA; but for those emotional, sex-crazed Cubans, it’s fine; we love it.” While it may be true that a seductive exoticism is what attracts North American and Europeans to las ENA, he irresponsibly decontextualizes Porro stating that as a trailblazer, “idealistically sought a path to a new “Cubanidad” in architecture that would eschew North American and European paradigms and, in general, mainstream modernism”. It may be that the qualities that are attractive about las ENA are colonialist, condescending, and racist, but these very same qualities have been constitutive of Cuban cultural thought and practice since the colonial period: Alejo Carpentier famously stated in his 1927 novel Écue-Yamba-Ó, “The bongo, antidote to Wall Street!” For instance, the eroticized black or mulata female body has been an important, if problematic, symbol for Cuban national identity, a point Dorris Sommer makes about Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1839). In some ways Porro’s brown domes are a continuation of this unfortunate trope, but nonetheless one rooted in Cuban intellectual tradition. As for evoking Cuba’s African heritage, that is standard fair in Cuban cultural production (Lam’s paintings, the Afro-Cuban poetry of 20s and 30s, or Lydia Cabrera’s (another Paris-educated Cuban) masterwork El Monte (1954). What about tropical sensuality? One need only look at a painting by Amelia Palaez or read one of the more luxurious passages from Lezama Lima’s Paradiso (1966) to realize that Cubans themselves have long exploited this motif.

Rather than reading the interest in las ENA as betraying a “disturbing trace” neo-imperialism, it would have been fruitful had Freeman positioned the project within the context of Cuban thought, a context can also be accused of colonialism, condescension, and racism. It may be that in architecture las ENA was “stillborn”, but it came from somewhere that immediately recognizable in Cuban thought not simply an experiment for, to use the Brazilian phrase, an Englishman to see.
]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/beyond-national-art-schools-architecture-in-cuba/32018/#comments 2012-03-03T17:26:44-05:00 Governments in the late 50's and early 60's wanted to seem "modern", and hired name brand first world architects to build signature projects, usually in a design idiom that bore little resemblance to the historical local architecture.
Meanwhile, local architects labored away outside of the spotlight, and build hybrids of modern architecture and local realities.
It took decades for architecture tourists to look beyond Corbusier, and Kahn, and the Eames, for example, in India, and see that people like Balkrishna Doshi had been building truly Indian modern buildings for a long time.

Large projects like this are flashy and attract attention, often deserved- its kind of the "Brasilia" phenomenon. But the true architectural heritage of any country is not the exception, but how well the average buildings and mundane necessities are designed.]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/beyond-national-art-schools-architecture-in-cuba/32018/#comments 2012-03-02T15:21:56-05:00 http://places.designobserver.com/feature/beyond-national-art-schools-architecture-in-cuba/32018/#comments 2012-03-01T13:45:17-05:00 http://places.designobserver.com/feature/beyond-national-art-schools-architecture-in-cuba/32018/#comments 2012-02-29T11:10:32-05:00