Now, the publication of Cuban Modernism: Mid-Century Architecture, 1940–1970, by Victor Deupi and Jean-François Lejeune, delivers a welcome addition to the sparse bookshelf of Cuban architectural history. I am thinking of his La Habana: arquitectura del siglo XX, published in 1998 (though never translated into English), and The Havana Guide: Modern Architecture, 1925–1965, an indispensable Baedeker that has enabled my personal project to track down every known Romañach building in Havana and to educate myself on the output of his contemporaries. 2 By far the most comprehensive work on 20th-century Cuban architecture has been that of the Havana-based architect and historian Eduardo Luis Rodríguez. 1 (Though now that I think of it, the overall ratio was about the same in both shows.) The few recent surveys of Latin American modern architecture go equally light on Cuba. The 2015 redux at MoMA, Latin America in Construction: Architecture, 1955–1980, had a larger showing, with the work of about a dozen Cuban architects. The 1955 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Latin American Architecture Since 1945, included just three works from Cuba (and one was by an American firm). The 20th-century architecture of Cuba has received less attention than that of its larger Latin American neighbors, where modernism arrived earlier and at a bigger scale.Ĭuba is a small country, so it is perhaps not surprising that its architecture has received less attention than that of its larger neighbors in Latin America, where modernism arrived earlier and at a bigger scale than in the Caribbean. This lack of awareness was a topic of rueful conversation two years ago at a colloquium convened at Penn to mark the centennial of Romañach’s birth and the opening of an exhibition of his work, which for most attendees came even then as a revelation. My own ignorance seems especially telling: I am a Cuban American who had studied art history, yet knew nothing about Cuban architecture. Yet back then none of us had any inkling of just how great an architect Mario was, or had been, in his native Cuba. Mario was elegant and erudite, possessor of an exquisite eye, a sharp but generous critic, beloved by students. When I was studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, in the mid-1970s, the chair of architecture was Mario Romañach. ![]() Max Borges Recio, Club Náutico, Playa, 1953. A comprehensive new study of mid-20th-century architecture in Cuba illuminates a powerful and neglected cultural legacy.
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