The Architecture

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Havana today has an unaltered yet largely decaying urban core, as seen here from a wide shot of a neighborhood, and

here from an alley shot, and here from a close-up shot of a building, .

But Havana, and Cuba as a whole, has beautiful Spanish Baroque buildings, some of which are deteriorating now, broken-down movie theatres, and apartment and office buildings that are tropical variants of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and even Streamline Moderne. Mixed in are smaller

buildings that have a distinctive American urban feel, such as this one, .

Here are some examples of other Cuban architecture, in its many shapes and forms:

In addition, there are Morris Lapidus Modern hotels that were discredited after the Cuban Revolution because they were associated with United States exploitation. Now they are owned by the government, are refurbished without casinos, and are once again mainly tourist hotels.

Here are some examples of these kind of modern buildings: .

But perhaps the most depressing element to Cuban architecture is not the condition or number of buildings themselves but rather the attitude of Fidel Castro towards constructing beautiful buildings, or at least preserving them, as Frances Anderton relates, "In the introduction to the Havana Project 1996, a collection of theoretical insertions in Havana by such luminaries as Eric Owen Moss, Thom Mayne, and Coop Himmelblau, Fidel Castro wrote 'Cuba has no need for monuments."

Anderton herself can only speculate as to the true nature of the comment. It may be, as she partly thinks, that it is a tacit warning to foreign architects to not apply their kind of monuments to Cuba. Or, as she also states, "it may simply have been a declaration of Castro's long-standing commitment to a collectivist, socially useful building programme which has, since the revolution, produced acres of utilitarian building but little of beauty."

Source: Anderton, Frances. "Letter from . . . Cuba." Architectural Review, v. 2007, n.1235, (Jan. 2000): 26.

Entry Page - The Land - The People