99% Invisible - 166- Viva La Arquitectura!

Episode Date: May 27, 2015

On January 3rd, 1961, Che Guevara suggested to Fidel Castro that they go play a round of golf. They drove out to what was then the ritziest, most elite country club in Havana. It was empty—almost all the members had … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. After the revolution in Cuba, the young Fidel Castro hired an official photographer by the name of Alberto Cora to chronicle his new life as a national leader. Cora followed Castro and Che Guevara, taking pictures of them as they met world leaders, went fishing, faced off in chess. He even took that iconic image of Che, the one that's on millions of t-shirts.

That's common, I'd trouble me. But my favorite images that Corda captured are of Che and Fidel playing golf. It was January 3rd, 1961, two years after the revolution. When Che suggested they go play around. You know, Figueroen said, well, you know, I don't play golf, and Che did play golf. He was actually pretty good. And he'd been a caddy back in Chile.

Helping us tell this story is John Lumis. I'm John Lumis. I'm an architect and an architectural historian. So Che and Fidel drove out to what was the Ritzios most elite country club in Havana. All the members of the club, they practically have all left the country, but still here's this amazing place. The people who work here are still keeping everything clean and neat and taking care of it. And Che and Fidel romp around the bucolic green acres. In full military khaki and combat boots. Chase still wearing that beret.

And Castro is choking up on a golf club as if he's never seen someone use a golf club before. They're just putting around and grinning while Alberto Corda snapped publicity shots of them. And you know you look at the photographs and they're like school boys just having fun and this was a lark and everybody thought this was you you know, a real, a real hoot. And the photos are actually beautiful because Corda is an incredible photographer, but also because the landscape is breathtaking. There's a river running through all these gently undulating, perfectly manicured hills bordered by this thick, lush forest of tropical plants.

It's kind of magical. Che Inf Fidel were captivated by this place, and they looked around and wondered, what should we do with this? You know, this is a wonderful resource. It wasn't going to stay a golf course, that was for sure. And some say it was Fidel's idea, other say it was Che's, but one of them turned to the other and explained his vision for the property.

There, they would build an art school. An international school for the arts that would draw students from all over the third world and bring them to Cuba and give them a first-class art education and all the art disciplines of free of charge. And a beautiful vision for a beautiful landscape required a beautiful building. Che and Fidel decided they wanted to build the most gorgeous art schools in the world, something fitting with the newness and excitement of the fresh revolution. Castro was recommended the young Cuban architect Ricardo Poro,

and he knew that Ricardo was very, had very much supported the revolution, had risked his own life. By housing rebels, Poro had never picked up a gun or anything. And in addition to his commitment to the revolution, he was also really talented. So he seemed like the obvious person to choose. Poro was told that if he wanted to design the schools, he would have to do it almost immediately. You have to end the project in two months to begin the construction, I say, but it's impossible. This is footage of Ricardo Poro in 2004. Poro passed away in 2014. Poro was told that's it, two months for the designs. You take it or you leave it. And I remember I asked and I said, well, so Ricardo, what

you said, and he says, well, John, you're an architect, you know? You say, I take it! I take it! Now the art school wasn't just one school. It was imagined as an entire campus with five separate schools for five distinct disciplines. ballet, modern dance, visual arts, music, and theater. Ricardo Poro was going to need some help. He recruited two architect friends, two Italians, Fitorio Garati and Roberto Gautardi.

Oh, and in addition to the time crunch, there was the embargo. Already with the embargo, importing concrete and rebar was very expensive. They had to use what they had. The three architects decided to build with locally made brick and terracotta tiles. And with these tiles, they decided to make schools comprised of cattle and vaults. A cattle and vault is essentially a dome made of layered tiles. And it's called a cattle and vault because it's predominantly used in Catalonia, especially Barcelona.

It was adopted particularly by Gaudi to do these very organic forms. And so, with the unifying element of brick and unified style of Catalan Vault, the three architects began to erect their separate designs around the edges of the golf course. Okay, I'm going to throw journalistic impartiality to the wind here. These buildings are so beautiful. Each uses the vault in a completely different way. And they all roll over the landscape of the golf course and mix with the plants and the palm trees,

and they wind, and they bend, and they unfurl into these plazas and courtyards. And their curving rooftops with all those vaults make them look alive, like they're dancing. And each school has a clear story to tell, with very intentional symbolism. But Poro's school of visual art was the most literal. He imagined the school of visual arts, or as they called it, the school of plastic art,

as a building that would nurture art and artists, and help give rise to a uniquely post-revolution Cuban aesthetic. This school was going to give birth. So I tried to make this school of plastic art as the image of a goddess of fertility. So I put a lot of rest in the domes. No, really. The vaulted domes have these nipples on them.

And there was a special fountain in the main piata. And in the piata, I placed a sculpture I did. Just like a fruit called papaya, that in Cuba has this sexual feminine connotation. Some higher ups found this pretty scandalous. Poro was told to turn the water in the fountain off. Yes, you have the breast, and here you have the papaya, which is a metaphor for what everybody knows in the Caribbean. But I think that it's wrong to overemphasize that.

Because really, John Luma says that the school is a commentary on Cuba's past and future. As you're walking down those curved passageways, you can't see where you've been, and you can't see where you're going. In a way that was a metaphor for this new chapter in Cuba, this was a new adventure, this new revolution. The revolutionary spirit was the driving force of the design and the construction. The Catalan vault required a lot of labor, so there was this massive crew of young Cuban

workers on the golf course making these structures. All the workers felt a real buy-in because they felt that they were building the school that their children could potentially go to, whereas previously they had no hope that their children would go to university or to an art school. And this endeavor was so exciting that the schools basically opened while they were still being built. At some point when construction began, they said, well, let's just use the space. The country club was already there with its meeting rooms and ballrooms, and of course

they had those manicured grounds on the beautiful weather. Ballerinas pirouetted on the putting green. Painter set up their canvases in the shade, violinists practiced in the forest. And students brought water and drinks and food for the construction workers and played drums to keep their spirits up. It was this beautiful, joyous undertaking, except when it wasn't.

During that time and still today, it's difficult to talk about the negative aspects of the revolution. So people really focused on the joyous part and the optimism, you know, because that's what do you hold on to when you're in this land of paradox. Alessanamias co-produced a documentary about the Cuban art schools. In Cuba, at the same time, for example, as artists were having drum parties to finish the buildings while the mason's were working and it was very beautiful and fun and joyous.

There were other students who were sent to labor camps because they were homosexual. Or religious, or in other ways, anti-revolutionary. And even before those agricultural labor camps opened in 1965, the anti-revolutionary students were expelled from the art schools. Ricardo Poro continued to give them classes in his home. Poro can feel that the values of the revolution were shifting, as he says in the documentary. I used to tell the other architects, don't lose your time, making small details. Try to do things fast because perhaps one day it's going to be stopped. After the missile crisis, after the Bay of Pigs, military defense was given a much higher

priority than, say, creating the most beautiful art schools in the world. So there was the money issue, but also generally generally, Cuba was starting to imitate the Soviet Union in more and more ways. I made a very individual architecture and they wanted Soviet architecture. The Soviet architecture was blocky, functional, uniform, one-size-fits-all, completely the opposite of the sensuous, organic vaults and curves of the art schools. There was an idea that the designs for the Cuban National Art Schools were extravagant for a socialist revolution that had to tighten its belt. And one of the earliest proponents of that argument was Roberto Segre.

Roberto Segre was the architecture critic. Like really, he was the only one. He had tremendous influence. Segre was not a fan of the breasts and the papaya fountain, as Segre himself says in the film. No, I am not a game the sex. I like the sex with whom and not with architecture. These days, Segre admits that he was a bit harsh.

Now, Segre will say that he really didn't want to write those things, but he was under constraints by people higher up, mostly Antonio Quintana. Antonio Quintana was the last of a generation of established Cuban architects. All his contemporaries had fled during the revolution, and this left Quintana at the top of his field by default, and he wanted it to stay that way. Kintana clearly had a personal desire not to see Ricardo Poro continue to thrive as an architect in Cuba. The architect Kintana and the critic Roberto Segre helped turn favor against the schools. Workers were slowly reduced the amount of workers. Poro's buildings were far enough finished,

so they were really able to be brought to the finish line or very very very close. But the schools designed by the other two architects were not so lucky. The theater school was only 30 percent complete. The music school was also unfinished but had a few usable rooms. The most unfinished was the ballet school, which didn't have floorboards or glass on the windows. All the materials were there and it could have been finished in like 15 days. And the lead of the Cuban ballet, Alicia Lonso, who's a very famous Cuban ballerina, she visited the site.

And she says, I don't like it. No more ballet here. And that was that. The Cuban ballet opted for a much more centrally located studio. And in July of 1965, the schools were just declared finished in all their varying states of completion. They had an opening, declared them open, and they were used in the state that they were. Even the unfinished ballet school was used very briefly, as a Russian circus school.

The architects were scattered to different jobs within the Ministry of Construction. Ricardo Poro started working directly under Antonio Quintana, that last of the old guard architects, Poro's nemesis. Quintana gave him very demeaning jobs. He gave him the job to design a cage for an eagle in the zoo. Oh my God. I couldn't work anymore in my architecture,

or I had to do all four things as they were doing. And I decided to lift Cuba. In 1966, Poro left Cuba and moved to Paris. And as for the schools themselves, the crazy thing is that they never closed. Even during some horrible spells in Cuba's history, when entire families were squatting in the rundown parts of the schools and ransacking them for materials, classes have always continued.

Well, except for the ballet school where the classes never quite started, but the other four art schools continued to be among the finest in the world. Although they are not as big as they were meant to be, and they're pretty rundown in some parts. It floods. Like the first time I went there, there was a guy playing drums, but I think there was like a foot of water in the building. Today the schools are known as ISA, Issa. Issa, what it's called now. The Institute Superior de Arte. So no one's going to come yell at us? the institute superior, the arte.

So no one's going to come yell at us? Especially on the rain nobody's going to come. The schools with students have guards of course, but Felipe del Zidas showed every the abandoned ballet school. I have come many times and haven't seen any security guard, which is a problem because now that is graffiti and things happening there that shouldn't be happening. Sometimes you want the security to be there. Felipe is a multimedia artist who once studied at the theater school.

Back then, the unfinished ballet school was a mysterious ruin. Because when I was totally here in the 80s, the whole thing here was a jungle. Students would go there and party and stuff. To hang out if you have a girlfriend or a date, it was a great place to roam. He didn't know the story of the buildings. No one really did. The story of this school was a somehow like a taboo. It was never spoken, never discussed. It was somehow like a taboo. It was never spoken, never discussed. It was, there was like a secrecy about it. But then John Lumis, who we've been talking to throughout this episode,

published his book about the schools called Revolution of Forms. Revolution of Forms came out in March of 1999. And through Revolution of Forms, Felipe finally learned the story of this place where he had studied for five years. This is really shameful, and that they are not taking care of their things. This is something that was done with a lot of love and with a lot of care.

And it's something that only belonged to Cuba, y es algo que no solo es lo que es lo que es lo que es lo que es lo que es la cultura humana, la cultura humana. Y Felipe, no era la única persona inspirada por Luma. Pero yo tengo esperanza que ustedes me defiendan y defiendan la idea de que este escuela superior the idea that this school is higher than the one in the 40th grade. That is Fidel Castro in 1999 saying, this school will get done. This national art school that we imagined will get built. Okay, we can't say that John Luma single-handedly convinced Fidel Castro to take action on the art schools.

But the year revolution of forms came out, Fidel Castro publicly committed to restoring them. All three architects reunited in Havana and met with high-level government officials to plan the restoration. But this project was abandoned in the wake of the financial crisis in 2000. For now, the schools remain in various states of completion. But even in their current disrepair, the architecture speaks for itself. This view is...

Something else. Something else. Look at my skin. Who's pumps? Yeah, this is for to look at something. Mm. The schools of Issa don't look like any other buildings in the world. They are Cuban.

They are the product, victim, and symbol of a revolution. To really understand the majesty of these schools, including some fascinating parts of the story that just don't translate to radio, watch the beautiful documentary, Unfinished Spaces, by Alyssa Namius and Ben Murray. It's rentable on iTunes, but you can find out all about it at UnfinishedSpaces.com. You've also been listening to the film Soundtrack throughout this episode, which was composed by Giancarlo Volcano. Special thanks, of course, to John Lomis, author of Revolution of Forms. I was accused in Cuba of being an employee of the CIA and writing this book to embarrass Cuba,

and that's not all. I don't think it embarrasses Cuba. I hope not. Along with Jacob Reems, Jill Hamburg, Albert Lopez, Dorothea Troublemen, and Charles Coppola. I am the producer and the broadest of Kubanikan, the new Cuban opera. The opera about the Cuban art schools just premiered at the art schools. As far as we know, the last full Cuban opera written in Cuba and performed in Cuba was over 50 years ago. It sounds like this. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Avery Truffleman with Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars.

We are a project of 91.7 KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxan. The East Bay's premiere, architecture and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can keep up with all the comings and goings of 99% invisible on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and Spotify and you can always catch up with us at our place at 99pi.org. RX.