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“The city, although deteriorated, remains pretty much frozen in time,” says Sonia Chao, a research associate professor at the School of Architecture and daughter of Cuban emigrants. “Each layer of Havana’s 500-year architectural and urban legacy, and their respective inherent lessons, remains clear.”
“That’s invaluable and it makes Havana a really unique place for our students to learn about urbanism and architecture,” adds Chao, director of the Center for Urban and Community Design.
Her involvement in Cuba goes back to 2002. Under the tutelage of a U.S. foundation, she has visited the island on numerous occasions, re-opening the door to academic dialogues and collaborating on historic preservation, sustainability, urban design and building codes, with faculty and students from UM and the University of Havana’s CUJAE-Instituto Superior Politecnico José Antonio Echevarría, and the Offices of the Historian in the cities of Havana, Cienfuegos and Santiago.
Her scholarly activities on Cuban architecture include design workshops, lectures, exhibitions, including one at the second Architecture Biennial in Havana, and multiple publications, including a book due out later this year. Chao’s extensive academic work fostered the form-based preservation minded design and building codes that eventually emerged for three historic neighborhoods in Havana.
With foundation support, hundreds of books in Spanish were donated to the CUJAE. Others were edited and produced in collaboration with local academics on urbanism and coding trends that would prove seminal for Cuban architects and students.
“The local academics are the curators of that great (Cuban) urbanism and architecture,” says Chao, who, since 2004 has been teaching a popular class at UM called Havana: The Challenges and Opportunities of Preserving the Past. “To think that they wouldn’t have the most recent kind of information at their disposal seemed to put them at a handicap.”
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Other faculty has been instrumental in establishing academic relationships with Cuban scholars, such as Rafael Fornes, lecturer at the School of Architecture.
“Ever since its founding, the University of Miami School of Architecture has had huge interest with Cuba,” says Fornes. “There have been great exchanges between professors.”
Since 1996, Fornes has taught a class called Studies of La Habana at UM which explores not only the architecture, but the culture of the city as well. Using his many contacts on the island, he led student trips to Cuba as a visiting professor for Notre Dame and Yale Universities. After 1996, when it became near impossible to travel to Cuba, Fornes organized trips to such places as New Orleans, Key West and Saint Augustine, cities that have “a great Cuban influence.”
Born and raised in Havana, Fornes graduated from the CUJAE in 1981 and worked on several projects in his native Cuba. After immigrating to Hungary, Fornes moved to Miami in 1992 and came to know several prominent Cuban-American architects, including Andres Duany, lecturer at the School of Architecture. Duany and former Dean of the UM School of Architecture Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, both highly influential architects, are credited with launching the New Urbanism movement.
In 1998, Fornes returned to Cuba to teach a series of seminars at the CUJAE on Miami’s Architecture and Urbanism. The seminars were very well received and gradually opened the way for other UM professors to visit the island.
In the early 2000’s, Duany began a series of lectures to University of Havana architecture students on New Urbanism. His lectures were captured in a book titled Charlas en el Capitolio de La Habana Sobre el Nuevo Urbanismo (Talks at the Havana Capitol Building on New Urbanism).
The work of School of Architecture faculty in the island continues. In November 2016, Fornes and lecturers Jorge Trelles and Ricardo Lopez participated in the Convenciόn Científica de Ingenieria y Arquitectura (The Scientific Convention of Engineering and Architecture) at the Convention Center in Havana.
Recently, UM Professor Victor Deupi, the son of Cuban-born architects, and his colleague, Professor Jean-Francois Lejeune curated an exhibit, “Cuban Architects at Home and in Exile: The Modernist Generation,” at the Coral Gables Museum. The display covered the work of prominent Cuban architects inside and outside the island demonstrating the breadth and diversity of Cuban architecture. Dozens of pictures, drawings, documents and letters were on display along with photos of buildings from the Tropicana Night Club to the National Bank in Havana.
For Deupi, getting to know many of the architects in the exhibit had a special meaning.
“This was my father’s generation,” says Deupi. “They were his teachers, his colleagues, mentors and his employers,” he says.
Deupi says much of the archival items came from boxes that had been long forgotten and stored away in closets by the relatives of the architects or the architects themselves. Thanks to the success of the exhibit, most of the documents, photos, maps and other architectural objects will be donated to the UM Libraries Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC) so that the legacy of these Cuban architects will be preserved and available for posterity.
“We are building the archive of Cuban architecture,” Deupi says.
- BARBARA GUTIERREZ / UM News
