The Cuban architecture, especially the modern architecture buildings, boast an exciting and eclectic blend of styles, from the Art Deco and Spanish buildings that preceded them to the Brutalist and modern influences that occurred during the postwar period.
1. The National Arts Schools of Cuba
These modern architecture buildings, featuring Ricardo Porro’s airy design and sweeping brick Catalan arches for the School of Modern Dance, invoke a sexiness and sensuousness that he felt symbolizing something uniquely Cuban and the utopian spirit of the age. It was both an inspired design and a move inspired by the post-embargo material shortage.
These buildings were commissioned by Fidel Castro shortly after the revolution on the former site of a country club. The school was supposed to be one of the five built in Havana, but it was the only one almost completed by 1965, when Fidel Castro defunded the project.
A series of documentaries and books brought more attention to the state of the building after decades of neglect. It sparked a restoration movement and even a proposal to have Norman Foster updating the buildings in 2012.
