Cuban Intersections of Literary and Urban Spaces by Riobó Carlos;Riobo Carlos;

Author:Riobó, Carlos;Riobo, Carlos; [Riobo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3407159
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2011-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.1 Competing architectural magazines, El Arquitecto, May 1929, and Arquitectura, April, 1945. Archival Research, Avery Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. Scan by Gabriel Fuentes.

Practicing Modernism: 1940–1959

By the 1940s and into the 1950s, the polemical debates between tradition and modernity made their transition from the pages of architectural journals into architectural practice and education in Havana. The “40s generation” triggered a rebellion against eclecticism that would, by the 1950s, transition into a rigorous and passionate “search for truth”; that is, a search for a genuinely Modern Cuban architecture grounded in both tradition and modernity, one that was at once nationalist and vanguardist. In the process, the Modern Movement was grounding itself in Cuba's institutional frameworks. In 1943, The Cuban section of the Congress of Modern Architecture was established under the name Agrupación Tectónica de Expresión Contemporánea (ATEC). ATEC's mission was to filter an institutionalized Modernist ideology into architectural education and practice in Havana, an ideology that would rupture, and subsequently transform both from within.

In July 1949, Walter Gropius (a member of ATEC) lectured at the University of Havana—his visit fueling a growing passion for Modern architecture among young and increasingly progressive architecture students and faculty. According to architectural and urban scholar Nicolás Quintana,

The results from Gropius's visit were very positive. Our work and the concepts analyzed were exposed to direct criticism, on site, from one of the great teachers of Modern architecture. Furthermore, he established a level of friendship and communication with some of us that persisted until his death. His interest for ‘what was happening in Cuba architectonically’ was firm. (Personal Communication with Nicolás Quintana 2005)

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