Tag: havana | ArchDaily

The Standardized Planning of Latin American Cities: Tracing the Blueprint of the Laws of the Indies

Moises Carrasco — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 05:00:00 +0000

A look at most of the cities within Latin America reveals striking commonalities across countries, from Mexico down to Argentina: most cities have a well-defined area known as "El Centro" (The Center), anchored by a main plaza (Plaza Mayor), flanked by a church on one side and key buildings like the city hall on another. This is no coincidence, as it can be traced back to an urban planning system established during the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. It gave standardized guidelines for city design across its viceroyalties. Unlike French and English colonies, Spanish settlements adhered to regulations that contributed to the emergence of a shared urban identity, with cities displaying similar spatial logic and architectural cohesion despite differing scales and contexts.

Grupo Finca in Cuba: "We Found in the Informality of Our City a Legal Void Where We Can Operate"

Paula Pintos — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 05:00:00 +0000

Resisting an adverse context and navigating its restrictions, Grupo Finca emerges, a collective that explores the practice of architecture from an artistic and pedagogical dimension in Havana, Cuba. Given the complexity of the country's political and social situation, informal architecture is common: low resources, difficulty in obtaining materials, high costs, and a lack of skilled labor, among other challenges, are some of the obstacles faced by independent architecture professionals. Coupled with the absence of a regulatory legal framework that would allow them to work formally in the labor market or acquire materials and supplies, the construction of contemporary architecture in Cuba is relegated to independent processes that can somehow overcome these barriers.

B House / Infraestudio

Agustina Coulleri — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 03:00:00 +0000

This house is located on a cliff west of Havana, surrounded by the sea. Despite having a large program size required, we had the intuition that the house should use itself to hide in the landscape and maintain the characteristics of an existing old house: its 14m x 14m perimeter, gabled roof and portal on all four sides.

Under Construction: Infraestudio and the new Cuban Architecture

Fabian Dejtiar — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 05:00:00 +0000

Infraestudio is an architecture and art practice based in Havana that has been obsessed with fiction since its foundation in 2016. Fernando Martirena, Anadis González, and other members and collaborators work from a narrative and discursive approach to experiment with various resources such as buildings, research, exhibitions, writings, and activism. This has allowed them to operate discreetly in a city frozen in time, recounting how contemporary architecture is done in Cuba today.

As Cuban Homes Collapse, Is There Hope to Rebuild?

Kaley Overstreet — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 07:30:00 +0000

The average age of a home in Cuba is just over 75 years old, and three of them collapse every day. Cuba’s housing crisis is perhaps one of the most unique examples of urban inequity in the world. While the island nation’s extensive history of waves of foreign influence has largely shaped their government, and in turn their public policies and urban planning strategies, they yet have been able to stabilize their long-standing housing crisis- forcing thousands of Cubans to live in derelict homes or public shelters. Now, many questions are being raised about how they will build new housing, repair the existing structures, and revise laws that allow Cubans to have more autonomy in the homeownership process.

Santa Clara Residence / Ad Urbis Arquitectos

Andreas Luco — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Located barely a few meters from Havana Bay, the studio for Santa Clara residence involved a complex research process. This process was mainly focused on discovering the rules to follow within the regulatory framework in the area, all of which allowed us later to add two levels above the original structure of the building.

U House / Albor Arquitectos

Valeria Silva — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 15:00:00 +0000

The existing house is a serialized character modest construction of isolated typology, conformed by one level, a porch made up of arches and a front garden. It is part of an urbanization built in the 1930s for workers of a military structure that formerly existed near the site.

Preserving Cuba's History as Modern Developments Rise in Havana

Kaley Overstreet — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 07:35:00 +0000

Havana appeals to those who romanticize the idea of a city that seems to be completely frozen in time. The capital’s urban fabric proudly displays its history, as it experienced waves of Spanish, Moorish, and Soviet influence. What really lies beyond the Revolutionary kitsch of vintage Buicks parked in front of colorful, yet crumbling homes, is the deprivation that Cuba has experienced throughout history.

Street Photography Tour of Havana, Cuba with Pratt Institute

Sponsored Post — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 02:30:00 +0000

Havana has often been referred to as a time machine — a city that transports its visitors to a distant moment and time in history. The capital city’s colorful Spanish colonial-style architecture has made it a go-to destination for photographers, architects, and people seeking life in a bygone era. From classic cars to “its overall sense of architectural, historical and environmental continuity makes it the most impressive historical city center in the Caribbean and one of the most notable in the American continent as a whole,” remarks UNESCO.

These Are the 5 Most Colorful Cities in the Americas

HAUS — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 08:00:00 +0000

The grays of concrete and pollution are not the only representation of cities and towns in the Americas. As perfect postcard material, many cities in the new world express the vibrancy of the people and places through color. HAUS, ArchDaily's partner, has selected five of these cities, which show us how color can bring light to the day-to-day life of cities.

7 Sites in Havana That Tell the Story of Cuba’s Rich Architectural History

Kaley Overstreet — Wed, 23 May 2018 09:30:00 +0000

Havana is often referred to as a time machine that transports visitors to a particular moment in history, seemingly frozen in time. While it is a city that boasts an exhaustive timeline of imported styles, Havana in the present day is not defined by a singular historical era—either in its political climate or in its architectural zeitgeist.

Download High Resolution World City Maps for CAD

Nicolás Valencia — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 12:00:00 +0000

Mapacad is a website that offers downloads of .dwgs of dozens of cities. With 200 metropolises in their database, the founders have shared a set of their most-downloaded cities.

How Combining Social Housing with Tourism Could Help Solve Havana’s Housing Crisis

Ariana Zilliacus — Sat, 14 Jan 2017 09:30:00 +0000

The largest of the Caribbean islands, Cuba is a cultural melting pot of over 11 million people, combining native Taíno and Ciboney people with descendants of Spanish colonists and African slaves. Since the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro, the country has been the only stable communist regime in the Western hemisphere, with close ties to the Soviet Union during the Cold War and frosty relationship with its nearby neighbor, the United States, that has only recently begun to thaw. While the architecture in the capital city of Havana reflects the dynamic and rich history of the area, after the revolution Havana lost its priority status and government focus shifted to rural areas, and the buildings of Havana have been left to ruin ever since. Iwo Borkowicz, one of three winners of the 2016 Young Talent Architecture Award, has developed a plan that could bring some vibrancy, and most importantly some sustainability, back to Havana, the historic core of the city.

How New Laws Are Allowing Architecture to Flourish in Cuba

Julia Cooke — Sat, 19 Sep 2015 09:30:00 +0000

For decades, Cuba's communist economic system has essentially outlawed all forms of private architectural work. In 2011 though, wide-ranging economic reforms brought a challenge to this status quo. In this article, originally published on Curbed as "In Cuba, Architecture and Design Blossom Under New Laws," Julia Cooke explores how these laws to bring about a more flexible economic system are allowing a different kind of architecture to emerge.

Harrison & Abramovitz's U.S. Embassy Reopens in Havana

David Langdon — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 16:00:00 +0000

For the first time in over a half-century, the United States reopened its official diplomatic embassy in Havana earlier today, shining an international spotlight on Harrison and Abramovitz's modernist shoreline classic. Historically maligned by many Cubans as an embodiment of American arrogance and imperialism, the building has played a pronounced symbolic role in the escalation - and now the easement - of political animosities between the two countries.

Havana Revisited: Postcards of the Cuban Capital Through the Years

Mario Coyula — Sat, 07 Mar 2015 09:30:20 +0000

Thanks to its privileged position as a gateway to North America and Cuba's unique political history, the architecture of the City of Havana has a rich and layered quality rarely found. In a new book edited by Cathryn Griffith, "Havana Revisited: An Architectural Heritage," this history is explored in detail through 12 essays by renowned architects, historians, scholars, preservationists, and urban planners in both Cuba and the United States and a selection of 350 color images comparing historic postcards with the city of today. The following text is the book's introduction, written by Cuban architect, urban planner and critic Mario Coyula (1935-2014).

AD Classics: United States Embassy in Havana / Harrison & Abramovitz

David Langdon — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 01:00:00 +0000

The United States’ diplomatic presence in Cuba is housed in a severe, early-1950s office building perched on the shoreline over Havana Bay. Walled off from the city and pulled back from the street, the building has the uneasy presence of a haunted castle – shunned and maligned by its neighbors, but subjected to the unending scrutiny of suspicious eyes and intrigued gossip of the locals. With its regimented orthogonalities and the unmistakably foreign imprint of modernist efficiencies, both the embassy's architecture and the optimistic political spirit it embodies seem to belong to another era, a cooperative past no longer conceivable in the wake of a half century of underhanded diplomacy, calumnious propaganda, and failed attempts to restore relations between the embattled countries.

AD Classics: The National Art Schools of Cuba / Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garatti, Roberto Gottardi

Gili Merin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 10:30:00 +0000

In 1961, Fidel Castro said: “Cuba will count as having the most beautiful academy of arts in the world." The Cuban National Schools of Arts, originally imagined by Castro and Che Guevara, are perhaps the largest architectural achievements of the Cuban Revolution. The innovative design of the schools, which aimed to bring cultural literacy to the nation, encapsulated the radical, utopian vision of the Revolution.