Havana: The Latest Architecture and News

A look at most of the cities within Latin America reveals striking commonalities across countries, from Mexico down to Argentina: most cities have a well-defined area known as "El Centro" (The Center), anchored by a main plaza (Plaza Mayor), flanked by a church on one side and key buildings like the city hall on another. This is no coincidence, as it can be traced back to an urban planning system established during the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. It gave standardized guidelines for city design across its viceroyalties. Unlike French and English colonies, Spanish settlements adhered to regulations that contributed to the emergence of a shared urban identity, with cities displaying similar spatial logic and architectural cohesion despite differing scales and contexts.

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Resisting an adverse context and navigating its restrictions, Grupo Finca emerges, a collective that explores the practice of architecture from an artistic and pedagogical dimension in Havana, Cuba. Given the complexity of the country's political and social situation, informal architecture is common: low resources, difficulty in obtaining materials, high costs, and a lack of skilled labor, among other challenges, are some of the obstacles faced by independent architecture professionals. Coupled with the absence of a regulatory legal framework that would allow them to work formally in the labor market or acquire materials and supplies, the construction of contemporary architecture in Cuba is relegated to independent processes that can somehow overcome these barriers.

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Infraestudio is an architecture and art practice based in Havana that has been obsessed with fiction since its foundation in 2016. Fernando Martirena, Anadis González, and other members and collaborators work from a narrative and discursive approach to experiment with various resources such as buildings, research, exhibitions, writings, and activism. This has allowed them to operate discreetly in a city frozen in time, recounting how contemporary architecture is done in Cuba today.

For these reasons, Infraestudio was selected by ArchDaily as one of the best new architectural practices of 2023. They are concerned with creating architecture that blends into the landscape, showcasing emptiness as a representation of an idea, focusing not on forms but on strategies, and building with the bare essentials.

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Havana has often been referred to as a time machine — a city that transports its visitors to a distant moment and time in history. The capital city’s colorful Spanish colonial-style architecture has made it a go-to destination for photographers, architects, and people seeking life in a bygone era. From classic cars to “its overall sense of architectural, historical and environmental continuity makes it the most impressive historical city center in the Caribbean and one of the most notable in the American continent as a whole,” remarks UNESCO.

The grays of concrete and pollution are not the only representation of cities and towns in the Americas. As perfect postcard material, many cities in the new world express the vibrancy of the people and places through color. HAUS, ArchDaily's partner, has selected five of these cities, which show us how color can bring light to the day-to-day life of cities.

Mapacad is a website that offers downloads of .dwgs of dozens of cities. With 200 metropolises in their database, the founders have shared a set of their most-downloaded cities.

The files contain closed polyline layers for buildings, streets, highways, city limits, and geographical data--all ready for use in CAD programs like Autocad, Rhino, BricsCad and SketchUp.

For the first time in over a half-century, the United States reopened its official diplomatic embassy in Havana earlier today, shining an international spotlight on Harrison and Abramovitz's modernist shoreline classic. Historically maligned by many Cubans as an embodiment of American arrogance and imperialism, the building has played a pronounced symbolic role in the escalation - and now the easement - of political animosities between the two countries.

Thanks to its privileged position as a gateway to North America and Cuba's unique political history, the architecture of the City of Havana has a rich and layered quality rarely found. In a new book edited by Cathryn Griffith, "Havana Revisited: An Architectural Heritage," this history is explored in detail through 12 essays by renowned architects, historians, scholars, preservationists, and urban planners in both Cuba and the United States and a selection of 350 color images comparing historic postcards with the city of today. The following text is the book's introduction, written by Cuban architect, urban planner and critic Mario Coyula (1935-2014).

Havana’s modest beginnings came in the sixteenth century, as the springboard for Spain’s conquest of America. When the port became the obligatory last American stop for Spanish ships making their return voyages to Europe, its significance grew until Havana had become the most important city in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. From the beginning, it was a settlement oriented toward providing services, especially that of protection. Hence, Havana became home to the most formidable system of defensive fortifications in the colonial Americas.

The United States’ diplomatic presence in Cuba is housed in a severe, early-1950s office building perched on the shoreline over Havana Bay. Walled off from the city and pulled back from the street, the building has the uneasy presence of a haunted castle – shunned and maligned by its neighbors, but subjected to the unending scrutiny of suspicious eyes and intrigued gossip of the locals. With its regimented orthogonalities and the unmistakably foreign imprint of modernist efficiencies, both the embassy's architecture and the optimistic political spirit it embodies seem to belong to another era, a cooperative past no longer conceivable in the wake of a half century of underhanded diplomacy, calumnious propaganda, and failed attempts to restore relations between the embattled countries.

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In 1961, Fidel Castro said: “Cuba will count as having the most beautiful academy of arts in the world." The Cuban National Schools of Arts, originally imagined by Castro and Che Guevara, are perhaps the largest architectural achievements of the Cuban Revolution. The innovative design of the schools, which aimed to bring cultural literacy to the nation, encapsulated the radical, utopian vision of the Revolution.

Unfortunately, the nation’s idealistic enthusiasm lasted for a fleeting moment in time and the Schools quickly fell out of favor; they were left to decay before even being completed. Today, following nearly four decades of neglect, the architects have returned to try and bring these derelict schools back to their intended glory.