Albor Arquitectos is a Cuban architecture studio founded in 2016 by Carlos Manuel González Baute, Alain Rodríguez Sosa, Camilo José Cabrera Pérez and Merlyn González García. They say that building in Cuba is a complex task, a growing challenge due to the lack of materials, high costs and restrictions on the independent practice of the profession.

Even in this context, their work, such as Casa Soporte, Casa Casita and El Apartamento, stands out for the continuity of the inherited city, the rediscovery of construction techniques and an architecture based on proximity to the people and the prevailing social reality.

Selected by ArchDaily as one of the New Practices of 2021 and recently winner of second place in the Building of the Year Award 2022 for their project Casa Torre, we conducted the following interview to tell us more in detail about all their inspirations, motivations and ways of working from Cuba.

Graphics, even before language and writing, were the first means of communication and significance for humanity. Drawing is the act of replacing reality with representation, that is, replacing objects with images encoded in each of the graphic representation systems.

In architecture, graphics stimulate the imagination and are the basis of project thinking since they do not only constitute our code of communication but configure our ability to express ourselves in disciplinary terms. In fact, at first, the drawing is constructed in the mind of the architect, before it looks for support from any type of instrument.

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More than 5000 new projects published throughout 2021 make ArchDaily the largest online architecture library in the world. ArchDaily Curatorial Team researches, contacts offices, prepares, and delivers the built projects in the world on a daily basis, with the objective of providing inspiration, knowledge, and tools to our users who take part in the creation of better built environments. 

As our world evolves at an unprecedented pace, the challenges that come with it are becoming more and more complex. The questions faced by the cities and networks of our global world, the physical and virtual environments where our evolution takes place, are making architecture more relevant than ever. 

The issues of the built environment are no longer exclusive to the incumbents who build and design it and have become transversal questions in our society. From the citizens who question the quality of their public spaces to the self-trained builder erecting a tiny house in the woods, to the homeowners using an app to codesign their interiors during lockdown, we want to have a saying and we want to take action. Why does architecture have to be so uncertain, so distant? 

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