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All architecture is political; some architecture says so outright. In 1959, the newly established revolutionary government in Cuba enlisted architecture, along with the other arts, in a campaign to give visual form to a utopian social vision.
Dozens of the designs that resulted are documented in this absorbing show of photographs, texts and videos, organized by Eduardo Luis Rodriquez, an architect and a historian.
Cuba’s most innovative architecture was actually produced in the 1950’s by a generation of brilliant Modernists; many of them left Cuba after Fidel Castro declared that work done for private commissions was no longer acceptable.
But a few stayed; others arrived; and in the first flush of revolutionary fervor, ambitious projects were undertaken.
Some were variations on 50’s styles, but conceived on an exaggerated scale. Geometric forms, like circles and stars, were adopted to convey specific political meanings.
Certain revolutionary-era designs, like those for schools of the arts, have already been extensively documented, while those for housing, recreation and government offices are less familiar outside of Cuba and give this show particular interest.
A few projects here, like the residential units at La Habana del Este, were collective efforts; the majority were produced by individuals, like Carlos Fernandez’s charming tourist cabins on stilts (they look like birdhouses) and Mario Girona’s fabulous pinwheel plan for the Coppelia ice cream parlor in Havana, which resembles an airport.
The revolutionary high was brief. Expediency soon curtailed experimentation. Plans were abandoned, and buildings fell into disrepair, as is evident in a series of moving film interviews with elderly architects.
In the end, the show strikes an ambivalent note about promise and promises broken.
But it also records an important moment of flowering, when new had a spiritual rather than commercial ring, and an intensely politicized modernism both built on and rubbed up against a less intense old one. Sparks flew. .
