CU Art Sch
August 23, 2001

The Dallas Morning News - Havana - Italian Roberto Gottardi, on the neglected grounds of Cuba's National Art Schools, was one of three "rebel" architects who designed the five-building complex in the early 1960s. The project soon fell out of favor, labeled too flashy and expensive. After most of the rich fled Cuba, rebel leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara played a few holes of golf at the Havana Country Club. As they strolled across the exquisite greens, they made a brash promise: to turn the seized property into the finest art school of its kind. Even before ground was broken, Mr. Castro was calling it "the most beautiful academy of arts in the whole world." And so was born one of the strangest yet little-known stories of modern architecture, a tale of youthful exuberance, red tape, intolerance and, finally, redemption. Work on the massive five-building complex started in 1961 and was quickly seen as an architectural marvel, an expression of revolutionary passion and pride. But it soon fell out of favor. It was too flashy, too hedonistic and too expensive, unlike the practical, though unsightly, concrete-slab apartments springing up east of the city. And so 36 years ago last month, Cuba's National Art Schools officially opened - unfinished. Much of the complex then plunged into ruin - "abandoned in the middle of the jungle, a Tikal of the 1960s," Cuban art critic Gerardo Mosquera later wrote, referring to the famous Mayan complex in Guatemala. Now, incredibly, the Cuban government has asked the original architects to return and finish their masterpiece, listed along with Peru's Machu Picchu and Italy's ancient Pompeii as one of the world's 100 most endangered monuments.  "I felt very good when I heard I'd get to continue the project," said Roberto Gottardi, a 74-year-old Italian who moved to Cuba in 1960 and designed the project's drama school. "This time I think it will be finished. It's in the government's interest - and Fidel Castro's, too." Under Mr. Castro's original plan, Cuban students and roughly 3,000 other young people from around the Third World were to study at the academy, all expenses paid. "The students are going to live in the houses that were the residences of millionaires," the Cuban president said at the time. Work on the project began in earnest just weeks after the failed CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. "Cubans felt euphoric, enthusiastic," said Mr. Gottardi, who supported the revolution. "We were breathing in air that told us 'everything is possible.' "Sometimes we did a drawing one day that would be used to raise a wall the next day. We'd work to the beat of African drums." Joining Mr. Gottardi were two other "rebel" architects - Ricardo Porro, a Cuban born in 1925, and Vittorio Garatti, an Italian born in Milan in 1927. Mr. Porro opposed dictator Fulgencio Batista and allowed Castro loyalists to hide out in his home in the 1950s. He later fled to Venezuela, where he met Mr. Garatti and Mr. Gottardi. After Mr. Castro took power, the three were asked to design the academy. "I could not shoot a gun, much less kill anyone. But I aided the revolution wherever possible," Mr. Porro was later quoted as saying in the 1999 book Cuba's Forgotten Art Schools - Revolution of Forms . The book's author, John Loomis, chairman of architecture at the California College of Arts and Crafts, said he first caught a glimpse of the schools during a visit to Cuba in 1981. A guide whisked him away, explaining that the complex was "inappropriate architecture" for the revolution. He returned to Cuba 10 years later and met Mr. Gottardi, who gave him a tour of the schools. "It was so utterly moving and astonishing," Mr. Loomis said. "I felt like an explorer, like I had discovered something nobody knew about." Mr. Loomis said he was especially intrigued by the ballet school, wedged in a lush ravine. It was 95 percent complete when it was deserted and was used briefly as a hall for student circus performers in the 1970s. Thieves moved in quickly, carrying away ceramic tiles and mahogany panels. Looters smashed windows and scribbled on walls. Then nature took over, engulfing the school in vines, plants and, occasionally, water from the nearby Quibu River. "What a metaphor for the Cuban revolution - ideals overgrown by reality," Mr. Loomis said. "This is what happens to dreams." He spent six years researching his book and concluded that the academy wasn't finished because it clashed with Cuba's changing and increasingly extreme political culture. Not everyone agrees. Some blame the academy's decline on shifting priorities and the desperate need for new housing. One sprawling European-style housing project for 8,000 people was designed almost overnight and finished before 1960. Many such projects were designed by young architects who had very little experience. After the revolution, about half of the 600 or so architects in Cuba left, critic Sergio Baroni wrote in 1992. Scarce resources added to the difficulties, Mr. Gottardi said. "There was a surplus of enthusiasm, but we lacked many things." If money was an issue, Mr. Loomis asks, why was the ballet school dumped when it was nearly finished? "It doesn't make economic sense to walk away from it." Five schools were designed for students of dance, drama, ballet, music and art. Architects used what was readily available - terra cotta tiles and bricks. They didn't have steel beams, so they supported their buildings with Catalan vaults, a sturdy, labor-intensive dome structure used for centuries in Europe. Mr. Porro put the dance school on a ridge on the south side of the golf course. He wanted the building's roof, viewed from above, to look like broken glass hit by a fist and shattered, symbolic of the revolution's overthrow of the old order, according to Mr. Loomis. He also designed the art school, giving it the feel of an African village "fused with the heightened sensuality and eroticism of the tropics," wrote one researcher. Mr. Garatti designed the ballet school. He wanted it to be tropical and at one point even considered submerging it. He settled on huge wooden fanlights, dark passageways and majestic Catalan domes that appeared to defy gravity. He also created the music school, an innovative, snakelike structure nearly 400 yards long and filled with lights and shadows. Only a third of it was built. The drama school was Mr. Gottardi's project. Much of it is now covered by vegetation, far from what the architect envisioned. Using bricks and little else, he wanted to build an urban village with streets leading to a stage in the center. "A lot of people want me to finish the project exactly as I designed it, but I think that would be a mistake," he says now. "Cuba's changed, I've changed. I'm not the same boy I was." Cuban students have been using four of the five art schools since even before they officially opened. The scholarship program for foreign students never materialized, however, and the buildings have had very little maintenance for 35 years, Cuban architects say. The schools, Mr. Porro said, emerged at a time when the revolution was "more surrealist than socialist." Then socialism kicked in - and so did the criticism. The Catalan vaults are going to collapse, killing the students, warned some party hard-liners, adding that reinforced concrete should have been used. By 1963, the government had banned private architectural practices. Officials began encouraging the standardized building designs that the Soviets favored and shunned such innovators as Mr. Porro, said Mr. Loomis. Some Castro loyalists even left decapitated chickens on Mr. Porro's lawn; he left for Paris in 1966. Mr. Garatti returned to Italy in 1974 after the Cubans jailed him for three weeks on what were later seen as trumped-up espionage charges. "These architects were first given a commission to do a job. They really believed they were creating a new utopia, a new world. Then they had the rug pulled out from them," Mr. Loomis said. "They were treated very, very badly." The government's decision to finish the schools puts "these very fine architects ... back on the map," he said. For nearly a decade, some Cuban and foreign architects had been quietly pushing for a renovation of the academy. The government began replastering some of the dance school's walls in 1997, but little else was done. Mr. Loomis published his book in early 1999. As the story goes, it wound up in Mr. Castro's hands, and he ordered the schools repaired. The government summoned the three original architects, and they met in Cuba in December 1999 - their first encounter in more than three decades. The architects say the schools' political message to the world in the '60s was that culture and education were among the top priorities of the small, embattled island. That message in today's Cuba is as important as ever, Castro supporters say. Still, money may be an obstacle, Mr. Loomis said. "Cuba has committed to restoring the schools, but they're struggling to put together the financial pieces," he said. Meanwhile, the World Monuments Fund in New York has added the schools to its list of the 100 most-endangered sites. The group raises money to preserve imperiled cultural sites around the globe, though fund officials say they can't send any money to Cuba because of the U.S. ban on trade with the island. Still, the art schools - the youngest site the group has ever recognized - represent "an extraordinary example of revolutionary architecture for that epoch," fund vice president John Stubbs said. "They have many character-defining features, including a very daring use of thin-shelled domes. They are magnificent." Mr. Loomis went further, calling the schools "the most memorable architectural works of the Cuban revolution ... the most genuine architectural expression of cubanida " - that which is Cuban.