'Imagining Cuba in 2004' is theme of students' architecture project

By Linda Myers

For tourists, Cuba's "Habana vieja" -- old Havana -- conjures up images of narrow, cobblestoned streets, stately old Spanish houses with wrought iron balconies and the sound of guitars.

But there's a newer Havana, too, one marked by uniquely Cuban modern architecture as well as signs of the country's desire to embrace tourism and the economic prosperity it is beginning to bring. It's the Havana of multiplicities, from the colonial to the contemporary, a city on the brink of change, that interests Milton Curry, an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Architecture, and the 11 fourth-year architecture students in his new design studio course on Cuba this semester.

Milena Gotcheva '04, architecture, presents her ideas for a commercial/cultural development in downtown Havana, during project presentations Nov. 22 in Tjaden Hall. Charles Harrington/ University Photography

In a project called "Imagining Cuba in 2004," the students individually undertook the redesign of a Havana site near the waterfront where two main avenues, Paseo Prado and the Malecon, intersect. Their task was to plan a structural complex that included both a youth hostel and a tourist hotel, a cinema, a Target store and a "virtual" embassy, for no country in particular.

But before developing their ideas, they needed to gain some understanding of the place. "Touristic experience, shopping, socializing in public plazas may have different meanings in Cuba than in more-developed economies," Curry warned them early on. In addition, while Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution in 1959-61 brought a repressive regime to power, he noted, it also brought about a 95 percent literacy rate, a solid health-care structure, low infant mortality rates and a thriving cultural milieu, "making Havana's urban character quite different from that of cities in countries like Brazil and Argentina."

The country's appeal, Curry says, is that it offers a multiethnic environment, with African and Caribbean as well as European influences. "It's a great place to look at those influences on architecture and culture. Because Cuba never underwent urban renewal, the entire city of Havana is a museum. It's one of the few places in the world where you can see examples of art deco, early modernist and Spanish colonial completely intact, albeit in need of repair."

Curry visited Cuba earlier this year with Cornell architectural historians Medina Lasansky and Mary Woods, who are looking into a collaboration between Cornell and University of Havana architecture and history of architecture students in the future.

While the effects of the U.S. embargo are evident in the island's rampant poverty and the Spartan lives most Cubans lead, since 1990 Cuba has been drawing more and more tourists from Canada and Europe, said Curry. If the trend continues, and barriers to U.S. tourism fall, "That's going to have a ripple effect on every part of the culture," he said.

In preparation for their studio project, the students studied not only the city's architectural history but the entire island's social and political history. They read such books as Louis Perez's Cuba Between Reform and Revolution and viewed a range of films about the country and its culture, including "La Permuta," on the informal house-swapping market among Havana's residents. The film series was done in tandem with a City and Regional Planning class on planning issues in Cuba, taught by visiting associate professor Barbara Lynch, director of the International Studies in Planning Program in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. (Lynch's course looked at decentralization and participation in planning decisions, economic development, infrastructure provision and monetary policy and their implications for regional, gender and racial equality.)

While a planned visit to the island fell through, Curry's students made virtual visits via the Web and also heard first-hand reports from guest lecturers. John Loomis, a faculty member from the California College of Arts and Crafts, spoke about the Cuban modernist architectural styles of the buildings that house the country's Art Schools in Havana. And Julio Cesar Perez, a Cuban architect, planner and historian who is a Havana resident, was a visiting critic, reviewing their projects this November.

Those experiences "forced the students to revisit and question assumptions that they might have had about the place," said Curry. While each presentation was highly individual, "the projects showed a maturity of thought and had in common an awareness of a place in flux as well as the dichotomy between rich cultural artifacts and the cash-poor condition of the people."

Milena Gotcheva's interior design for Target was supported by arched stanchions that, she noted, suggested old Havana's colonnaded streets. But they also evoked the scaffolding holding up aging buildings in the city's historic district as well as the precarious nature of Cuba's economic future, Curry pointed out. In addition, Gotcheva presented a series of postcards showing how people in the various spaces might interact. A ballroom between the embassy and hotel, for example, displayed posters of a popular Cuban club, offering "a literal or imagined connection with local people."

Yasemin Kologlu's project went further, emphasizing the tension between the store, cinema, hotel and embassy. She created apertures so that people in the various spaces could view one another, and her design promoted ease of movement and offered common areas where people from diverse social strata might actually rub shoulders with one another.

And Enoch Sears' project featured an ironic letter purportedly from the "free-market forces" to Castro, noting "Cuba's inevitable assimilation into the global economy." But his model featured a Target store buried in a mound -- a way to resist big-box economic exploitation, at least symbolically, and make it more subject to local control, Curry interpreted.

While none of the projects actually is intended to be built, the purpose of the exercise, "rethinking the urbanism of developing countries through new types of building and programming, is a pedagogical imperative for our architecture program here at Cornell," said Curry. Comparing the effort to a fiction-writing project in a class that builds writing skills, he said: "We have to structure thought in the realm of the imagination to have power in the world of the real."