National Schools of Art, Havana
Encyclopedia
Cuba
's National Art Schools (Escuelas Nacionales de Arte, now known as the Instituto Superior de Arte
) are considered by historians to be one of the most outstanding architectural achievements of the Cuban Revolution
. These innovative, organic Catalan-vaulted
brick and terra-cotta structures were built on the site of a former country club
in the far western Havana
suburb of Cubanacán, which used to be Havana's "Beverly Hills" and was then mainly reserved for Communist Party officials. The schools were conceived and founded by Fidel Castro
and Che Guevara
in 1961, and they reflect the utopian optimism and revolutionary exuberance of the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Over their years of active use, the schools served as the primary incubator for Cuba’s artists, musicians, actors, and dancers.
By 1965, however, the art schools and their architects fell out of favor as Soviet-inspired functionalist forms became standard in Cuba. Additionally, the schools were subjected to accusations that their design was incompatible with the Cuban Revolution. These factors resulted in the schools’ near-complete decommissioning and the departure of two of their three architects. Never fully completed, the complex of buildings lay in various stages of use and abandonment, some parts literally overgrown by the jungle until preservation efforts began in the first decade of the 21st century. The schools’ legacy was eventually brought to light by regional and international architectural journals in the 1980s, piquing the curiosity of observers both internationally and within Cuba through the 1990s. This growing interest reached its apex in 1999 with the publication of the book Revolution of Forms - Cuba's Forgotten Art Schools, by John Loomis, a California-based architect, professor, and author. Following the publication of Revolution of Forms, the schools attracted even greater international attention and in 2000 they were nominated for the World Monuments Fund
Watch List. In November 2010, the National Art Schools were officially recognized as national monuments by the Cuban Government, and they are currently being considered for inclusion on the World Heritage list of sites which have "outstanding universal value" to the world.
Cuba’s National Art Schools have inspired a series of art installations under the name of Utopia Posible by the Cuban artist Felipe Dulzaides
, the documentary film Unfinished Spaces by Alysa Nahmias and Ben Murray, and an opera directed by Robert Wilson
entitled Revolution of Forms (named after John Loomis' book) written by Charles Koppleman.
had just been launched, and with the inspiration of extending the program’s success into a wider cultural arena, Guevara proposed the creation of a complex of tuition-free art schools to serve talented young people from all over the Third World
. He conceived of the schools as highly experimental and conceptually advanced to serve the creation of a “new culture” for the “new man”. An innovative program called for innovative architecture, and Castro saw the Cuban architect Ricardo Porro as being that architect who could deliver such architecture.
Cuba’s National Art Schools represented an attempt to reinvent architecture in the same manner that the Cuban Revolution aspired to reinvent society. Through their designs, the architects sought to integrate issues of culture, ethnicity, and place into a revolutionary formal composition hitherto unknown in architecture.
, Roberto Gottardi
, and Vittorio Garatti
, ran counter to the dominant International Style
of the time. The three architects saw the International Style as the architecture of capitalism
and sought to recreate a new architecture in the image of the Cuban Revolution
. These critiques of modernism
existed in a broader context of critique and are considered to be notable additions to the spectrum of innovative architecture from the period. Architects such as Hugo Häring
, Bruno Zevi
, Ernesto Nathan Rogers
, and Alvar Aalto
, not to mention Frank Lloyd Wright
, all practiced on the margins of mainstream modern architecture. For Porro, Gottardi, and Garatti, this international response to modernism mixed with more region-specific expressions of Hispanic and Latin American identity (long after Gaudí but sharing his Catalan
influence) in the post-WWII world.
The architects set up their design studio on the site of the former country club. They decided that there would be three guiding principles for the design of the art schools. The first principle was that the architecture for the schools would be integrated with the widely varied, unusual landscape of the golf course. The second and third principles were derived from material necessity. The US embargo against Cuba, begun in 1960, had made the importation of rebar
and Portland cement
very costly. The architects therefore decided to use locally produced brick and terracotta tile, and for the constructive system they would use the Catalan vault
with its potential for organic form
. When Fidel Castro viewed the plans for the art schools, he praised their design, saying that the complex would be “the most beautiful academy of arts in the whole world”. There were five art schools within the academy: the School of Modern Dance
, the School of Plastic Arts, the School of Dramatic Arts, the School of Music
, and the School of Ballet
.
takes place in the narrow leftover interstices, open to the sky like streets, between the positive volumes of the masonry cells. Winding more or less concentrically through the complex, circulation negates the axiality and generalized symmetry that organize the plan. This presents an interesting contradiction between the formal and the experiential. While quite ordered in plan, the experience of walking through the complex is random and episodic.
that emerge organically from the landscape, traversing the contours of the ground plane. Garatti's meandering paseo arquitectonico presents an ever-changing contrast of light and shadow, of dark subterranean and brilliant tropical environments.
that follow a winding path. There are at least five ways to enter the complex. The most dramatic entrance starts at the top of the ravine with a simple path bisected by a notch to carry rainwater. As one proceeds, the terra cotta cupolas, articulating the major programmatic spaces, emerge floating over lush growth. The path then descends down into the winding subterranean passage that links the classrooms and showers, three dance pavilions, administration pavilions, library and the Pantheon
-like space of the performance theater. The path also leads up onto its roofs which are an integral part of Garatti's paseo arquitectonico. The essence of the design is not found in the plan but in the spatial experience of the school's choreographed volumes that move with the descending ravine.
provoked an international incident that posed serious challenges for Cuba. In addition, setbacks across the Socialist world (the assassinations of Ben Bella and Patrice Lumumba
, the Sino-Soviet split
, the newly-launched guerrilla war in Vietnam
), marked a turning point and created a sense of isolation and embattlement in Cuba facing the Cold War
alone in the Caribbean
. Production and defense became primary national priorities and the population was militarized. The government began to consider the National Art Schools to be extravagant and out of scale with reality. Construction of the art schools slowed down, as more and more of the workforce was now redirected to areas considered of greater national priority. The architects were also encountering criticism. Many in the Ministry of Construction did not trust the Catalan vault as a structural system. There was also a certain amount of envy on the part of many of the ministry bureaucrats toward the comparatively privileged conditions under which Porro, Gottardi, and Garrati were working. These tensions would prove to escalate.
As Cuba’s political environment evolved from one of utopian optimism into an evermore doctrinaire structure, following models provided by the Soviet Union, the National Art Schools found themselves as subjects of repudiation. The schools were criticized for ideological errors. The architects themselves were accused of being "elitists" and "cultural aristocrats," with "egocentric" bourgeois formations. The constructive system, the Catalan vault, was now criticized as a "primitive" technology that represented "backward" values of the capitalist past. The Afro-Cuban imagery of the School of Plastic Arts was attacked as representative of “hypothetical Afro-Cuban origins” which had been “erased by slavery” and therefore held no relevance of a society advancing toward a culturally uniform socialist future.
In October 1965, Hugo Consuegra
wrote a courageous defense of the National Art Schools, and their architects, that was published in the journal Arquitectura Cuba. This article was the last attempt of this period to reconcile the schools with the values of the Cuban Revolution. Consuegra described the formal complexities, spatial ambiguities, and disjunctive qualities of the schools not as in contradiction with but as characteristic and positive values of the Cuban Revolution. However, Consuegra’s courageous defense proved to be in vain, and as the schools fell out of institutional favor, they were slowly abandoned. The Schools of Modern Dance and Plastic Arts continued to be used, though with little regard for their maintenance, and the Schools of Dramatic Arts, Music, and Ballet were allowed to fall into various states of abandonment and decay. The School of Ballet, nestled in a shady ravine, became completely engulfed in tropical jungle overgrowth. Ricardo Porro and later Vittorio Garatti were compelled to leave the country.
The 1990s were a decade of political, if not material, rehabilitation for the schools and their architects. In 1991, the Hermanos Saíz organized a provocative exhibit entitled Arquitectura Joven that was presented as part of the Fourth Havana Biennial. Prominent in the exhibition was a photomontage by Rosendo Mesias highly critical of the crumbling state of the schools. In 1995, the schools were nominated for national monument status but were rejected for not being old enough to meet criteria. Also in 1995, the U.S. photographer Hazel Hankin held an exhibit in Havana of photographs of the schools in their state of neglect. The exhibit provoked a strong response, and in 1996, upon the initiative of Cuban cultural officials, the New York architects Norma Barbacci and Ricardo Zurita prepared nomination papers on behalf of the schools for the World Monuments Fund
. The schools were eventually added to the WMF watch list in 2000 and 2002. In 1997, the Cuban National Conservation Institute designated the National Art Schools as a “protected zone”.
The three architects also underwent a process of political "rehabilitation". Vittorio Garatti first returned to Cuba in June 1988 for a personal visit. Ricardo Porro returned for the first time in March 1996 for a series of public lectures, which were attended by standing-room-only audiences. Porro returned again in January 1997 to conduct a three-week design charrette with students, and give lectures. Vittorio Garatti also returned later that same year in June and lectured at the Colegio de Arquitectos. Porro returned again in 1998 to lecture, and in that same year an issue of Arquitectura Cuba was dedicated to him and his work. The subsequent issue was dedicated to Roberto Gottardi and his work. Throughout the 1990s there was much debate about the schools and this debate moved to higher and higher levels.
and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, generating copious press, including two articles in the New York Times. The exhibit went on to tour across Europe and the United States; all of the events and press coverage were closely followed by government officials in Cuba.
Revolution of Forms also became a major topic of discussion among architects in Havana. At one meeting prior to its publication a government official declared that Loomis, the author, was “an enemy of Cuba, being paid by the CIA, to write a book about the National Art Schools in order to make Cuba and the Revolution look bad”. By October 1999, however, the debate had reached the national congress of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba
(UNEAC) with the Council of State where the discussion was about the cultural role of architecture in Cuba. When it came to the National Art Schools, several important figures declared that the schools were the greatest architectural achievements of the Cuban Revolution. The ensuing discussion acknowledged the influence of Revolution of Forms—the international attention it had garnered and the many foreign travelers it had attracted to visit the National Art Schools. Unfortunately, the schools were in a far-from-presentable state. Shortly thereafter, Castro declared that the schools would be recognized, restored, and preserved as national monuments. Porro and Garatti were summoned to a meeting in December 1999 with government officials to plan for the restoration. In November 2011, the National Art Schools were declared monuments by the National Council of Conservation.
World Heritage Tentative List on February 28, 2003 in the Cultural category.
, a Cuban artist, had studied at the National Art Schools and had often marveled at the beauty of the architecture there—especially the magic realist aura evoked by the group of buildings. He had been unaware of their origins until he came upon a copy of Revolution of Forms in the United States. His artistic response to the story came later that year in the form of a video-documented performance-art piece called Next Time it Rains the Water Will Run, in which he cleans out the watercourses of the abandoned School of Ballet.
The story of the National Art Schools continued to inspire Dulzaides resulting in a performance/installation in 2004 for the Proyecto Invitación in Havana, which was followed by a more extensive, and highly acclaimed, installation titled Utopía Posible at the Gwangju Biennial (South Korea) in 2008 and the Havana Biennial in 2009. This endeavor also evolved into a documentary video titled Utopía Posible—a series of penetrating, and sometimes disquieting, interviews with Gottardi about his artistic quest for meaning during his years in revolutionary Cuba.
Non-Cubans have also been inspired by the universal nature of the story of the National Art Schools. Alysa Nahmias was so moved by the schools she saw during her study abroad experience in Cuba as an undergraduate at New York University that she began working on a documentary film about the schools in 2001. The film, Unfinished Spaces, was co-directed by Ben Murray and scheduled to premiere in 2011.
San Francisco area-based filmmaker Charles Koppelman
was also inspired by the schools’ story and sought a medium that would embrace all of the arts: visual arts, music, dance, and theater. His vision was for an opera, Revolution of Forms, named after the book from which he learned the schools’ story. Koppelman is producer as well as librettist along with author (and former NAS faculty member) Alma Guillermoprieto
. Robert Wilson
serves as director and designer, while Anthony Davis
, Gonzalo Rubalcaba
, and Dafnis Prieto
contribute their contributions to the music. Koppelman saw that this particular journey—a universal human quest to create a better world—played itself out in a heroic and classic literary arc of passion, love, betrayal, despair, and ultimately hope. It is in production to become a multilingual opera in five acts In May 2010, music from the first two acts of Revolution of Forms was performed at the New York Opera’s VOX series.
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
's National Art Schools (Escuelas Nacionales de Arte, now known as the Instituto Superior de Arte
Instituto Superior de Arte
The University of Arts of Cuba - , Instituto Superior de Arte was established on September 1, 1976 by the Cuban government as a school for the arts. Its original structure had three schools: Music, Visual Arts, and Performing Arts....
) are considered by historians to be one of the most outstanding architectural achievements of the Cuban Revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
. These innovative, organic Catalan-vaulted
Catalan vault
The Catalan vault, also called the Catalan turn or Catalan arch or a timbrel vault, is a type of low arch made of plain bricks often used to make a structural floor surface...
brick and terra-cotta structures were built on the site of a former country club
Country club
A country club is a private club, often with a closed membership, that typically offers a variety of recreational sports facilities and is located in city outskirts or rural areas. Activities may include, for example, any of golf, tennis, swimming or polo...
in the far western Havana
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
suburb of Cubanacán, which used to be Havana's "Beverly Hills" and was then mainly reserved for Communist Party officials. The schools were conceived and founded by Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
and Che Guevara
Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
in 1961, and they reflect the utopian optimism and revolutionary exuberance of the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Over their years of active use, the schools served as the primary incubator for Cuba’s artists, musicians, actors, and dancers.
By 1965, however, the art schools and their architects fell out of favor as Soviet-inspired functionalist forms became standard in Cuba. Additionally, the schools were subjected to accusations that their design was incompatible with the Cuban Revolution. These factors resulted in the schools’ near-complete decommissioning and the departure of two of their three architects. Never fully completed, the complex of buildings lay in various stages of use and abandonment, some parts literally overgrown by the jungle until preservation efforts began in the first decade of the 21st century. The schools’ legacy was eventually brought to light by regional and international architectural journals in the 1980s, piquing the curiosity of observers both internationally and within Cuba through the 1990s. This growing interest reached its apex in 1999 with the publication of the book Revolution of Forms - Cuba's Forgotten Art Schools, by John Loomis, a California-based architect, professor, and author. Following the publication of Revolution of Forms, the schools attracted even greater international attention and in 2000 they were nominated for the World Monuments Fund
World Monuments Fund
World Monuments Fund is a private, international, non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of historic architecture and cultural heritage sites around the world through fieldwork, advocacy, grantmaking, education, and training....
Watch List. In November 2010, the National Art Schools were officially recognized as national monuments by the Cuban Government, and they are currently being considered for inclusion on the World Heritage list of sites which have "outstanding universal value" to the world.
Cuba’s National Art Schools have inspired a series of art installations under the name of Utopia Posible by the Cuban artist Felipe Dulzaides
Felipe Dulzaides
Felipe Dulzaides is a Cuban-American artist.Felipe Dulzaides’ is an artist whose work includes video, installations, photography, assemblages, neon, performance-actions, drawings, social sculptures and concept based public art projects...
, the documentary film Unfinished Spaces by Alysa Nahmias and Ben Murray, and an opera directed by Robert Wilson
Robert Wilson (director)
Robert Wilson is an American avant-garde stage director and playwright who has been called "[America]'s — or even the world's — foremost vanguard 'theater artist'". Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video...
entitled Revolution of Forms (named after John Loomis' book) written by Charles Koppleman.
Conceptualization of Cuba's National Art Schools
In January 1961, the Cuban revolutionary leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, having finished a game of golf and now enjoying a drink at the bar of Havana’s formerly exclusive Country Club Park, pondered the future of a country club whose members had all fled the country. The Cuban Literacy CampaignCuban Literacy Campaign
The Cuban Literacy Campaign was a year-long effort to abolish illiteracy in Cuba after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution...
had just been launched, and with the inspiration of extending the program’s success into a wider cultural arena, Guevara proposed the creation of a complex of tuition-free art schools to serve talented young people from all over the Third World
Third World
The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...
. He conceived of the schools as highly experimental and conceptually advanced to serve the creation of a “new culture” for the “new man”. An innovative program called for innovative architecture, and Castro saw the Cuban architect Ricardo Porro as being that architect who could deliver such architecture.
Cuba’s National Art Schools represented an attempt to reinvent architecture in the same manner that the Cuban Revolution aspired to reinvent society. Through their designs, the architects sought to integrate issues of culture, ethnicity, and place into a revolutionary formal composition hitherto unknown in architecture.
Design of the five schools
The design of the National Art Schools, created by Ricardo PorroRicardo Porro
Ricardo Porro is a Cuban-born architect . He graduated in architecture from the Universidad de la Habana in 1949, following which he spent two years in post-graduate studies at the Institute of Urbanism at the Sorbonne. By the mid-1950s, his work took on distinctive Organic tendencies...
, Roberto Gottardi
Roberto Gottardi
Roberto Gottardi is an Cuban architect. He graduated in architecture from the Instituto Superiore di Architettura di Venezia in 1952, the same class as Massimo Vignelli...
, and Vittorio Garatti
Vittorio Garatti
Vittorio Garatti is an architect. He graduated in architecture in 1957 from the Politecnico di Milano, where Ernesto Nathan Rogers was a major influence. Guido Canella and Gae Aulenti were his classmates...
, ran counter to the dominant International Style
International style (architecture)
The International style is a major architectural style that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, the formative decades of Modern architecture. The term originated from the name of a book by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style...
of the time. The three architects saw the International Style as the architecture of capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
and sought to recreate a new architecture in the image of the Cuban Revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
. These critiques of modernism
Modern architecture
Modern architecture is generally characterized by simplification of form and creation of ornament from the structure and theme of the building. It is a term applied to an overarching movement, with its exact definition and scope varying widely...
existed in a broader context of critique and are considered to be notable additions to the spectrum of innovative architecture from the period. Architects such as Hugo Häring
Hugo Häring
Hugo Häring was a German architect and architectural writer best known for his writings on "organic architecture", and as a figure in architectural debates about functionalism in the 1920s and 1930s, though he had an important role as an expressionist architect.A student of the great Theodor...
, Bruno Zevi
Bruno Zevi
Bruno Zevi was an Italian architect, historian, professor, curator, author and editor. Zevi was a vocal critic of 'classicising' modern architecture and postmodernism.-University years:...
, Ernesto Nathan Rogers
Ernesto Nathan Rogers
Ernesto Nathan Rogers was an Italian architect, writer and educator.-Biography:Born in Trieste, Italy he graduated from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy in 1932...
, and Alvar Aalto
Alvar Aalto
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was a Finnish architect and designer. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware...
, not to mention Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 500 works. Wright believed in designing structures which were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture...
, all practiced on the margins of mainstream modern architecture. For Porro, Gottardi, and Garatti, this international response to modernism mixed with more region-specific expressions of Hispanic and Latin American identity (long after Gaudí but sharing his Catalan
Catalan people
The Catalans or Catalonians are the people from, or with origins in, Catalonia that form a historical nationality in Spain. The inhabitants of the adjacent portion of southern France are sometimes included in this definition...
influence) in the post-WWII world.
The architects set up their design studio on the site of the former country club. They decided that there would be three guiding principles for the design of the art schools. The first principle was that the architecture for the schools would be integrated with the widely varied, unusual landscape of the golf course. The second and third principles were derived from material necessity. The US embargo against Cuba, begun in 1960, had made the importation of rebar
Rebar
A rebar , also known as reinforcing steel, reinforcement steel, rerod, or a deformed bar, is a common steel bar, and is commonly used as a tensioning device in reinforced concrete and reinforced masonry structures holding the concrete in compression...
and Portland cement
Portland cement
Portland cement is the most common type of cement in general use around the world because it is a basic ingredient of concrete, mortar, stucco and most non-specialty grout...
very costly. The architects therefore decided to use locally produced brick and terracotta tile, and for the constructive system they would use the Catalan vault
Catalan vault
The Catalan vault, also called the Catalan turn or Catalan arch or a timbrel vault, is a type of low arch made of plain bricks often used to make a structural floor surface...
with its potential for organic form
Organic architecture
Organic architecture is a philosophy of architecture which promotes harmony between human habitation and the natural world through design approaches so sympathetic and well integrated with its site that buildings, furnishings, and surroundings become part of a unified, interrelated...
. When Fidel Castro viewed the plans for the art schools, he praised their design, saying that the complex would be “the most beautiful academy of arts in the whole world”. There were five art schools within the academy: the School of Modern Dance
Modern dance
Modern dance is a dance form developed in the early 20th century. Although the term Modern dance has also been applied to a category of 20th Century ballroom dances, Modern dance as a term usually refers to 20th century concert dance.-Intro:...
, the School of Plastic Arts, the School of Dramatic Arts, the School of Music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
, and the School of Ballet
Ballet
Ballet is a type of performance dance, that originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the 15th century, and which was further developed in France and Russia as a concert dance form. The early portions preceded the invention of the proscenium stage and were presented in large chambers with...
.
School of Modern Dance – Ricardo Porro
Porro conceived the modern dance school’s plan as a sheet of glass that had been violently smashed and fragmented into shifting shards, symbolic of the revolution's violent overthrow of the old order. The fragments gather around an entry plaza - the locus of the "impact" - and develop into an urban scheme of linear, though non-rectilinear, shifting streets and courtyards. The entry arches form a hinge around which the library and administrative bar rotate away from the rest of the school. The south side of the fragmented plaza is defined by rotating dance pavilions, paired around shared dressing rooms. The north edge, facing a sharp drop in terrain, is made by two linear bars, containing classrooms, that form an obtuse angle. At the culmination of the angular procession, farthest from the entry, where the plaza once again compresses is the celebrated form of the performance theater.School of Plastic Arts – Ricardo Porro
The concept for this school is intended to evoke an archetypal African village, creating an organic urban complex of streets, buildings and open spaces. The studios, oval in plan, are the basic cell of the complex. Each one was conceived as a small arena theater with a central skylight to serve students working from a live model. The studios are organized along two arcs, both of which are curving colonnaded paths. Lecture rooms and offices are accommodated in a contrasting blocklike plan that is partially wrapped by and engaged with the colonnaded path. Ideas of gender and ethnicity converge in the curvilinear forms and spaces of Plastic Arts. Most notable is how the organic spatial experience of the curvilinear paseo archetectonico delightfully disorients the user not being able to fully see the extent of the magic realist journey being taken.School of Dramatic Arts – Roberto Gottardi
The School of Dramatic Arts is urban in concept, as are Porro’s two schools. Dramatic Arts is organized as a very compact, axial, cellular plan around a central plaza amphitheater. Its inward-looking nature creates a closed fortress-like exterior. The amphitheater, fronting the unbuilt theater at what now is the entrance, is the focal point of all the subsidiary functions, which are grouped around it. CirculationCirculation (architecture)
In the field of architecture, circulation refers to the way people move through and interact with a building. In public buildings, circulation is of high importance; for example, in buildings such as museums, it is key to have a floor plan that allows continuous movement while minimizing the...
takes place in the narrow leftover interstices, open to the sky like streets, between the positive volumes of the masonry cells. Winding more or less concentrically through the complex, circulation negates the axiality and generalized symmetry that organize the plan. This presents an interesting contradiction between the formal and the experiential. While quite ordered in plan, the experience of walking through the complex is random and episodic.
School of Music - Vittorio Garatti
The School of Music is constructed as a serpentine ribbon 330 meters long, embedded in and traversing the contours of the landscape approaching the river. The scheme and its paseo arquitectonico begin where a group of curved brick planters step up from the river. This path submerges below ground as the band is joined by another layer containing group practice rooms and another exterior passage, shifted up in section from the original band. Displacements are read in the roofs as a series of stepped, or terraced, planters for flowers. This 15m wide tube, broken into two levels, is covered by undulating, layered Catalan vaultsCatalan vault
The Catalan vault, also called the Catalan turn or Catalan arch or a timbrel vault, is a type of low arch made of plain bricks often used to make a structural floor surface...
that emerge organically from the landscape, traversing the contours of the ground plane. Garatti's meandering paseo arquitectonico presents an ever-changing contrast of light and shadow, of dark subterranean and brilliant tropical environments.
School of Ballet – Vittorio Garatti
From the top of the golf course’s ravine, one looks down upon the ballet school complex, nestled into the descending gorge. The plan of the school is articulated by a cluster of domed volumes, connected by an organic layering of Catalan vaultsCatalan vault
The Catalan vault, also called the Catalan turn or Catalan arch or a timbrel vault, is a type of low arch made of plain bricks often used to make a structural floor surface...
that follow a winding path. There are at least five ways to enter the complex. The most dramatic entrance starts at the top of the ravine with a simple path bisected by a notch to carry rainwater. As one proceeds, the terra cotta cupolas, articulating the major programmatic spaces, emerge floating over lush growth. The path then descends down into the winding subterranean passage that links the classrooms and showers, three dance pavilions, administration pavilions, library and the Pantheon
Pantheon, London
The Pantheon, was a place of public entertainment on the south side of Oxford Street, London, England. It was designed by James Wyatt and opened in 1772. The main rotunda was one of the largest rooms built in England up to that time and had a central dome somewhat reminiscent of the celebrated...
-like space of the performance theater. The path also leads up onto its roofs which are an integral part of Garatti's paseo arquitectonico. The essence of the design is not found in the plan but in the spatial experience of the school's choreographed volumes that move with the descending ravine.
Decline of the National Art Schools
The 1963 Cuban Missile CrisisCuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation among the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States in October 1962, during the Cold War...
provoked an international incident that posed serious challenges for Cuba. In addition, setbacks across the Socialist world (the assassinations of Ben Bella and Patrice Lumumba
Patrice Lumumba
Patrice Émery Lumumba was a Congolese independence leader and the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo after he helped win its independence from Belgium in June 1960. Only ten weeks later, Lumumba's government was deposed in a coup during the Congo Crisis...
, the Sino-Soviet split
Sino-Soviet split
In political science, the term Sino–Soviet split denotes the worsening of political and ideologic relations between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the Cold War...
, the newly-launched guerrilla war in Vietnam
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
), marked a turning point and created a sense of isolation and embattlement in Cuba facing the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
alone in the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
. Production and defense became primary national priorities and the population was militarized. The government began to consider the National Art Schools to be extravagant and out of scale with reality. Construction of the art schools slowed down, as more and more of the workforce was now redirected to areas considered of greater national priority. The architects were also encountering criticism. Many in the Ministry of Construction did not trust the Catalan vault as a structural system. There was also a certain amount of envy on the part of many of the ministry bureaucrats toward the comparatively privileged conditions under which Porro, Gottardi, and Garrati were working. These tensions would prove to escalate.
As Cuba’s political environment evolved from one of utopian optimism into an evermore doctrinaire structure, following models provided by the Soviet Union, the National Art Schools found themselves as subjects of repudiation. The schools were criticized for ideological errors. The architects themselves were accused of being "elitists" and "cultural aristocrats," with "egocentric" bourgeois formations. The constructive system, the Catalan vault, was now criticized as a "primitive" technology that represented "backward" values of the capitalist past. The Afro-Cuban imagery of the School of Plastic Arts was attacked as representative of “hypothetical Afro-Cuban origins” which had been “erased by slavery” and therefore held no relevance of a society advancing toward a culturally uniform socialist future.
Soviet-style functionalism vs. organic revolutionary architecture
At the same time, these ideological issues also served to mask a very non-ideological drama. The National Art Schools and their architects were caught in a power struggle, with an architect named Antonio Quintana playing a major role. Quintana was a staunch modernist who, as the 1960s unfolded, embraced a Functionalist model for architecture, a model that advocated massive prefabricated production – precisely the model upon which architecture was based in the Soviet Union. This model was completely at odds with the site-specific, craft-oriented, formal poetry of the National Art Schools. Quintana quite successfully, and quickly, maneuvered his way up through the ranks of the Ministry of Construction to ever increasing power. His growing authority and outspoken criticism of the National Art Schools helped to determine their fate. In July 1965, the National Art Schools were declared finished in their various stages of completion and incompletion, and construction came to a halt.In October 1965, Hugo Consuegra
Hugo Consuegra
Hugo Consuegra was a Cuban-American architect and artist specializing in graphic design, painting, and engraving.-Education:...
wrote a courageous defense of the National Art Schools, and their architects, that was published in the journal Arquitectura Cuba. This article was the last attempt of this period to reconcile the schools with the values of the Cuban Revolution. Consuegra described the formal complexities, spatial ambiguities, and disjunctive qualities of the schools not as in contradiction with but as characteristic and positive values of the Cuban Revolution. However, Consuegra’s courageous defense proved to be in vain, and as the schools fell out of institutional favor, they were slowly abandoned. The Schools of Modern Dance and Plastic Arts continued to be used, though with little regard for their maintenance, and the Schools of Dramatic Arts, Music, and Ballet were allowed to fall into various states of abandonment and decay. The School of Ballet, nestled in a shady ravine, became completely engulfed in tropical jungle overgrowth. Ricardo Porro and later Vittorio Garatti were compelled to leave the country.
Rehabilitation of the National Art Schools
In 1982, a group of young Cuban architects, all critical of the way architecture was taught and practiced in Cuba, began meeting informally. In 1988 they were given official status as a part of the Hermanos Saíz, a young artists’ organization under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture. The 1980s in Cuba were a period that produced art that was highly polemical, even protest oriented. The Ministry of Culture had a higher tolerance for discord than the Ministry of Construction, and it was for this reason that young architects sought to associate themselves there. High on their agenda was the restoration of the National Art Schools to Cuba's architectural heritage. This was not necessarily a safe position to take at this time, yet the Ministry of Culture allowed them a certain latitude within which to maneuver. By 1989 John Loomis, a North American architect and scholar, met Roberto Gottardi and the Havana Biennial of Art, and Gottardi conducted him on a tour of the schools. Moved by the compelling architecture and story, Loomis embarked on a decade-long project that produced the book Revolution of Forms, Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools.The 1990s were a decade of political, if not material, rehabilitation for the schools and their architects. In 1991, the Hermanos Saíz organized a provocative exhibit entitled Arquitectura Joven that was presented as part of the Fourth Havana Biennial. Prominent in the exhibition was a photomontage by Rosendo Mesias highly critical of the crumbling state of the schools. In 1995, the schools were nominated for national monument status but were rejected for not being old enough to meet criteria. Also in 1995, the U.S. photographer Hazel Hankin held an exhibit in Havana of photographs of the schools in their state of neglect. The exhibit provoked a strong response, and in 1996, upon the initiative of Cuban cultural officials, the New York architects Norma Barbacci and Ricardo Zurita prepared nomination papers on behalf of the schools for the World Monuments Fund
World Monuments Fund
World Monuments Fund is a private, international, non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of historic architecture and cultural heritage sites around the world through fieldwork, advocacy, grantmaking, education, and training....
. The schools were eventually added to the WMF watch list in 2000 and 2002. In 1997, the Cuban National Conservation Institute designated the National Art Schools as a “protected zone”.
The three architects also underwent a process of political "rehabilitation". Vittorio Garatti first returned to Cuba in June 1988 for a personal visit. Ricardo Porro returned for the first time in March 1996 for a series of public lectures, which were attended by standing-room-only audiences. Porro returned again in January 1997 to conduct a three-week design charrette with students, and give lectures. Vittorio Garatti also returned later that same year in June and lectured at the Colegio de Arquitectos. Porro returned again in 1998 to lecture, and in that same year an issue of Arquitectura Cuba was dedicated to him and his work. The subsequent issue was dedicated to Roberto Gottardi and his work. Throughout the 1990s there was much debate about the schools and this debate moved to higher and higher levels.
Cuba's National Art Schools attain national monument status
1999 proved to be a critical year for the schools. In March, the book Revolution of Forms, Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools was launched at two high-profile events. In Los Angeles the launch took place at R. M. Schindler’s Kings Road House at the MAK Center, with an exhibition of photos of the schools by Paolo Gasparini taken in 1965. The event reunited Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garatti, and Roberto Gottardi for an emotional first time since 1966, when they had last seen each other in Havana. The MAK Center event was repeated in New York at Columbia UniversityColumbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, generating copious press, including two articles in the New York Times. The exhibit went on to tour across Europe and the United States; all of the events and press coverage were closely followed by government officials in Cuba.
Revolution of Forms also became a major topic of discussion among architects in Havana. At one meeting prior to its publication a government official declared that Loomis, the author, was “an enemy of Cuba, being paid by the CIA, to write a book about the National Art Schools in order to make Cuba and the Revolution look bad”. By October 1999, however, the debate had reached the national congress of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba
National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba
The National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba is a social, cultural and professional organization of writers, musicians, actors, painters, sculptors, and artist of different genres. It was founded on August 22, 1961, by the Cuban poet, Nicolas Guillen...
(UNEAC) with the Council of State where the discussion was about the cultural role of architecture in Cuba. When it came to the National Art Schools, several important figures declared that the schools were the greatest architectural achievements of the Cuban Revolution. The ensuing discussion acknowledged the influence of Revolution of Forms—the international attention it had garnered and the many foreign travelers it had attracted to visit the National Art Schools. Unfortunately, the schools were in a far-from-presentable state. Shortly thereafter, Castro declared that the schools would be recognized, restored, and preserved as national monuments. Porro and Garatti were summoned to a meeting in December 1999 with government officials to plan for the restoration. In November 2011, the National Art Schools were declared monuments by the National Council of Conservation.
World Heritage status
This site was added to the UNESCOUNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
World Heritage Tentative List on February 28, 2003 in the Cultural category.
Additional works inspired by the story of the schools
Felipe DulzaidesFelipe Dulzaides
Felipe Dulzaides is a Cuban-American artist.Felipe Dulzaides’ is an artist whose work includes video, installations, photography, assemblages, neon, performance-actions, drawings, social sculptures and concept based public art projects...
, a Cuban artist, had studied at the National Art Schools and had often marveled at the beauty of the architecture there—especially the magic realist aura evoked by the group of buildings. He had been unaware of their origins until he came upon a copy of Revolution of Forms in the United States. His artistic response to the story came later that year in the form of a video-documented performance-art piece called Next Time it Rains the Water Will Run, in which he cleans out the watercourses of the abandoned School of Ballet.
The story of the National Art Schools continued to inspire Dulzaides resulting in a performance/installation in 2004 for the Proyecto Invitación in Havana, which was followed by a more extensive, and highly acclaimed, installation titled Utopía Posible at the Gwangju Biennial (South Korea) in 2008 and the Havana Biennial in 2009. This endeavor also evolved into a documentary video titled Utopía Posible—a series of penetrating, and sometimes disquieting, interviews with Gottardi about his artistic quest for meaning during his years in revolutionary Cuba.
Non-Cubans have also been inspired by the universal nature of the story of the National Art Schools. Alysa Nahmias was so moved by the schools she saw during her study abroad experience in Cuba as an undergraduate at New York University that she began working on a documentary film about the schools in 2001. The film, Unfinished Spaces, was co-directed by Ben Murray and scheduled to premiere in 2011.
San Francisco area-based filmmaker Charles Koppelman
Charles Koppelman
Charles Koppelman is the chairman of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and was Martha Stewart's right-hand man on NBC's The Apprentice: Martha Stewart in 2005.-Career:...
was also inspired by the schools’ story and sought a medium that would embrace all of the arts: visual arts, music, dance, and theater. His vision was for an opera, Revolution of Forms, named after the book from which he learned the schools’ story. Koppelman is producer as well as librettist along with author (and former NAS faculty member) Alma Guillermoprieto
Alma Guillermoprieto
Alma Guillermoprieto is a Mexican journalist who has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press. Her writings have also been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world.-Life:...
. Robert Wilson
Robert Wilson (director)
Robert Wilson is an American avant-garde stage director and playwright who has been called "[America]'s — or even the world's — foremost vanguard 'theater artist'". Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video...
serves as director and designer, while Anthony Davis
Anthony Davis (composer)
Anthony Davis, better known as Tony Davis , is an American composer, jazz pianist, and student of gamelan music.-Biography:...
, Gonzalo Rubalcaba
Gonzalo Rubalcaba
Gonzalo Rubalcaba is a Grammy Award-winning Cuban jazz pianist and composer.Gonzalo Julio Gonzalez Fonseca was born in Havana, Cuba, May 27, 1963, into a musical family rich in the traditions of the country’s artistic past...
, and Dafnis Prieto
Dafnis Prieto
Dafnis Prieto is a Cuban Drummer, Composer and Educator. He is a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.-Life:"His arrival in the U.S. has been compared by to that of an asteroid hitting New York."...
contribute their contributions to the music. Koppelman saw that this particular journey—a universal human quest to create a better world—played itself out in a heroic and classic literary arc of passion, love, betrayal, despair, and ultimately hope. It is in production to become a multilingual opera in five acts In May 2010, music from the first two acts of Revolution of Forms was performed at the New York Opera’s VOX series.
Prominent alumni of Cuba's National Art Schools
- Ever Fonseca
- Tania Brugera
- Mirtha Ibarra
- Manuel Lopez-Oliva
- Dafnis Prieto
- Felipe DulzaidesFelipe DulzaidesFelipe Dulzaides is a Cuban-American artist.Felipe Dulzaides’ is an artist whose work includes video, installations, photography, assemblages, neon, performance-actions, drawings, social sculptures and concept based public art projects...
- Sandra Ramos
- Alexandre ArrecheaAlexandre ArrecheaAlexandre Arrechea was born in Trinidad, Cuba, in 1970. For twelve years he was a member of the art collective Los Carpinteros, until he left the group in July 2003 to continue his career as a solo artist....
- Rene FranciscoRené FranciscoRené Francisco was born in 1960 . He is an important contemporary artist in Havana. He first came at the ISA as a student in 1977, graduated in 1982 and studied until 1989, before becoming a professor ever since...
- KchoKchoKcho , Born Alexis Leyva Machado on the Isla de Pinos is a contemporary Cuban artist. Kcho has had art showings around the world. He first attracted international attention by winning the grand prize at South Korea's Kwangju Biennial in 1995.Kcho was born in Nueva Gerona, Cuba, in 1970...
- Roberto FabeloRoberto FabeloRoberto Fabelo is a contemporary Cuban artist. He is both a painter and illustrator.Born in Guáimaro, Camagüey, Fabelo studied at The National Art School and at the Superior Art Institute of Havana. He was a professor and a jury member for very important national and international visual arts...
- Los CarpinterosLos CarpinterosLos Carpinteros is the name of a group of young Cuban artists that specializes in creating humorous installations and objects. In 1991 Marco Antonio Castillo Valdes, Dagoberto Rodriguez Sanchez, and Alexandre Arrechea formed Los Carpinteros—however they didn’t adopt the name until 1994, “deciding...
- Manuel Piña
- Tonel (Antonio Elegio Fernandez)
- Maria Cristina Vives
- José Alberto Figueroa
- Gonzalo RubalcabaGonzalo RubalcabaGonzalo Rubalcaba is a Grammy Award-winning Cuban jazz pianist and composer.Gonzalo Julio Gonzalez Fonseca was born in Havana, Cuba, May 27, 1963, into a musical family rich in the traditions of the country’s artistic past...
- Gerardo MosqueraGerardo MosqueraGerardo Mosquera is a freelance curator and art critic based in Havana. He is an advisor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldenden Kunsten, Amsterdam and a member of the advisory board for several art centres and journals...
- Consuelo Castañeda
- Osvaldo Sanchez
- Flavio Garciandia
- José Bedia ValdésJosé Bedia ValdésJosé Braulio Bedia Valdés is a Cuban painter.Bedia studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro” and then finished his art studies at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana....
- Lupe Alvarez
Prominent faculty of Cuba's National Art Schools
- Alma GuillermoprietoAlma GuillermoprietoAlma Guillermoprieto is a Mexican journalist who has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press. Her writings have also been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world.-Life:...
- Lupe Alvarez
- Consuelo Castaneda
- José Bedia ValdésJosé Bedia ValdésJosé Braulio Bedia Valdés is a Cuban painter.Bedia studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro” and then finished his art studies at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana....
- Flavio Garciandia
- María Magdalena Campos PonsMaría Magdalena Campos PonsMaría Magdalena Campos Pons is a Cuban artist.Master in Fine Arts . Studio Review at Concordia University, Montreal NSCAD, Halifax, Canada....
- Osvaldo Sanchez
- Lazaro Saavedra
- Rene FranciscoRené FranciscoRené Francisco was born in 1960 . He is an important contemporary artist in Havana. He first came at the ISA as a student in 1977, graduated in 1982 and studied until 1989, before becoming a professor ever since...
- Eduardo Ponjuan
- Belkis AyónBelkis AyónBelkis Ayón Manso was a Cuban artist and lithographer. Her work was based on Afro-Cuban religion, combining the myth of Sikan and the traditions of the Abakuá, a men's secret society, though her work was often thought to reflect her personal issues as well. Her work began exhibition in 1988, and...
- Tania Brugera
- Flora Lawten
- Raquel Revuelta
- Vicente Revuelta
- Graciela PogolottiDino PogolottiDino Pogolotti was a real estate entrepreneur best known for the development in 1911 of what is still known today as the “Barrio Pogolotti” in Havana, Cuba...
- Helmo Hernandez
- Raquel Mendieta
External links
- Revolution of Forms (the book) website
- World Monuments Fund website on the National Art Schools
- World Monuments Fund Magazine article on the National Art Schools
- Excerpt from the documentary Unfinished Spaces by Alysa Nahmias and Ben Murray, via the World Monuments Fund
- Website and trailer for the film Unfinished Spaces
- IMDB entry for Unfinished Spaces
- Felipe Dulzaides website for Utopia Possible
- Revolution of Forms (the Opera) website
- Short clip of Revolution of Forms (the Opera)
- Charles Koppleman's website for Revolution of Forms the Opera
- The Lost Art Schools of Cuba
- Variaciones, by Humberto Solas
- National Schools of Art, Cubanacán - UNESCO World Heritage Centre