Preserving What? Design Strategies for a Post-Revolutionary Cuba

The Cuban Revolution’s neglect of Havana (as part of a broader socialist project) simultaneously ruined and preserved its architectural and urban fabric. On one hand, Havana is crumbling, its fifty-plus year lack of maintenance inscribed on its cracked, decayed surfaces and the voids where buildings once stood; on the other, its formal urban fabric—its scale, dimensions, proportions, contrasts, continuities, solid/void relationships, rhythms, public spaces, and landscapes—remain intact. A free-market Cuba, while inevitable, leaves the city vulnerable to unsustainable urban development. And while many anticipate preservation, restoration, and urban development—particularly of Havana’s historic core (La Habana Vieja)—”business as usual” preservation practices resist rampant (read: neoliberal) development primarily through narrow strategies of exclusion (where, what, how, and why not to build), museumizing Havana as “a city frozen in time.”Seeking a third option at the intersection of this socialist/capitalist divide, this paper describes 4 student projects from THE CUBA STUDIO, a collaborative Integrative Urban Studio at Marywood University’s School of Architecture. Over the course of 16 weeks, students in THE CUBA STUDIO speculated urban futures for a post-revolutionary Havana–strategizing ways of preserving Havana’s architectural and urban fabric in the face of an emerging political and economic shift that is opening, albeit gradually, Cuba to global market forces. And rather than submitting to these forces, the work critically engages them toward socio-cultural ends. Some driving questions were: What kind of spatial politics do we deploy while retrofitting Havana? How will the social, political, and economic changes of an “open” Cuba affect Havana’s urban fabric? What role does preservation play? For that matter, what does preservation really mean and by what criteria are sites included in the preservation frame? What relationships are there (or could there be) between preservation, tourism, infrastructure, education, housing, and public space? In the process, students established systematic research agendas to reveal opportunities for integrated“soft” and “hard” interventions (i.e. siting and programing), constructing ecologies across a range of disciplinary territories including (but not limited to): architecture, urban design, historic preservation/ restoration, art, landscape urbanism, infrastructure,science + technology, economics, sustainability, urban policy, sociology, and cultural/political theory. An explicit goal of the studio was to expand and leverage“preservation” (as an idea, a discipline, and a practice) toward flexible and inclusive design strategies that frame precise architectural interventions at a range of temporal and geographic scales.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2016.30

Volume Editors
Alfredo Andia, Dana Cupkova, Macarena Cortes, Umberto Bonomo & Vera Parlac

ISBN
978-1-944214-10-4