National Art Schools (Cuba)
[1] 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 was once considered to be Havana's "Beverly Hills", 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.
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.
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.
[4] 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)[5] written by Charles Koppleman.
The Cuban Literacy Campaign 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.
Through their designs, the architects sought to integrate issues of culture, ethnicity, and place into a revolutionary formal composition hitherto unknown in architecture.
[7] The design of the National Art Schools, created by Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi, and Vittorio Garatti, ran counter to the dominant International Style of the time.
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 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.
[10] 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 concept for this school is intended to evoke an archetypal African village, creating an organic urban complex of streets, buildings and open spaces.
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.
This 15m wide tube, broken into two levels, is covered by undulating, layered Catalan vaults 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.
The plan of the school is articulated by a cluster of domed volumes, connected by an organic layering of Catalan vaults that follow a winding path.
In addition, setbacks across the Socialist world (the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961, the coup against Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella in 1965, 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.
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.
[18] 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
[4] Felipe Dulzaides, 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.
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.
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.
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.
