Three architects were given a country club and almost no steel, so they built in brick and Catalan vaults. Then the work was stopped, and one of the five schools has never been finished.
At a glance
The National Art Schools stand on the grounds of the former Havana Country Club at Cubanacán, west of the city. Work began in January 1961, to designs by the Cuban architect Ricardo Porro with the Italians Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi. The embargo made concrete and reinforcing steel scarce, so the schools were built of locally made brick and terracotta tile, roofed with Catalan vaults. Construction was halted in the mid-1960s and never fully resumed. The site is a national monument and has been on the World Monuments Fund watch list of endangered places. The schools are now the Instituto Superior de Arte.
Key facts
- Begun: January 1961
- Site: the former Havana Country Club golf course, Cubanacán
- Architects: Ricardo Porro (Cuba), with Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi (Italy)
- Materials: brick and terracotta tile, with Catalan vaults — chosen because the embargo made concrete and rebar scarce and costly
- Halted: in the mid-1960s, one account giving 1965, as the revolution turned towards Soviet models
- Porro left Cuba: in 1966, for Paris
- Unfinished: the school of ballet was never completed
- Status: declared national monuments by the National Heritage Council; placed on the World Monuments Fund watch list
- Today: the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA)
- GPS: 23.0886, -82.4471 · Open in Google Maps
History
The schools begin with an anecdote that every account repeats and none quite fixes: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara on the fairway of a confiscated golf club, deciding that this was where the art schools would go. Whose idea it was depends on who is telling it. What is certain is that the project started in January 1961 and that Ricardo Porro was given about two months to design a campus.
He brought in two Italians he knew, Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi, and the three divided the five schools between them. They were working against an embargo: concrete and reinforcing steel were expensive and uncertain, and brick and tile were not. What looks today like a stylistic choice — the domes, the vaulted corridors, the curving brick — began as a constraint.
Then the climate changed. As the revolution aligned itself with Soviet planning, a campus of handmade vaults built by three individualists stopped being the right answer. Work was halted in the mid-1960s. Porro left for Paris in 1966. The school of ballet, the most elaborate of the five, was never finished, and parts of the site have been left to the vegetation ever since.
Condition
The schools are national monuments, and they have appeared on the World Monuments Fund list of endangered places: both things are true at once, which is the ordinary condition of twentieth-century heritage in a country without money for it. Some of the buildings are in use by the Instituto Superior de Arte; others are ruins with trees in them.
What you see
Low brick domes and long vaulted walks curving through what was a golf landscape, with the fairways still legible under the grass. The Catalan vault — thin tiles laid flat in layers, a technique from the Mediterranean that needs no steel and little formwork — gives the roofs their shallow curve and the corridors their rhythm.
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We publish only images we are allowed to publish, and we have found no freely licensed photograph of these buildings. If you hold one, or are at the Instituto Superior de Arte and can send one, we will add it to this page with the credit you ask for, as the opening image or in a gallery below the text.
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