 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
 Page 3 The Cuban response to this, in what has been said and what has been done to Plaza Vieja, reveals how planners there see their task. Rigol has described the schemes that emerged from the MAK symposium, including Moss's, as "amazingly sophisticated." But she considers them "out of any possibility to be currently applied to the Cuban context. Can something very attractive, but without identity or relation with the country's essence, then emerge as a new image of Cuban heritage?" The answer would seem to be no. Plaza Vieja is a principal locus of preservation work now. The parking garage was removed and the original grade restored. The entire plaza has been reserved for pedestrians. At its center is a new fountain that copies one from the eighteenth century. Slowly the buildings at the periphery--mostly palatial town houses that had been subdivided into apartments--are being renovated. In this process their original facades are restored, ground-floor spaces are given over to public functions such as galleries, and the floors above are reconfigured as modest apartments; so far these are providing homes for some 50 neighborhood families. The renewed Plaza Vieja will also include a cinema, school, and hotel. But Cuban designers are not interested only in a strict historicist approach. The hotel slated for restoration on Plaza Vieja, the 1906 Palacio Cueto, is a sinuous Catalonian-style Art Nouveau confection. Plans call for an addition that will reprise but simplify its lines and include a diaphanous drape fluttering over a mural. When asked about a design direction for infill construction on the hundreds of Havana plots where buildings have collapsed, Rigol suggests that there's no reason new buildings shouldn't be utterly fresh, drawing on the Cuban talent for Modernism and complementing without duplicating the scale and styles of surrounding structures. She points to several new examples of what is possible, like Roberto Gottardi's renovation of a nineteenth-century building, in a joint venture with an Italian investor, for the restaurant A Prado y Neptuno. It has a Modernist interior furnished with Mackintosh-inspired chairs and a mural depicting, among others, Frank Lloyd Wright, Carlo Scarpa, and Philippe Starck. In a recent project by the Havana architects José Antonio Choy and Julia León in Miramar--the city's classiest twentieth-century suburb, whose villas now house embassies and foreign corporate offices--a 1957 bank building was wrapped in a swooping Deconstructivist addition of glass and steel. "The original classic Modern, sober facade [is] more evident than it was before," Rigol has written, "intelligently showing two different but matching stages of the building's life." Havana's planners are drawing on the enthusiasm of foreign designers to realize some of these projects. They invited Howard Ben Tré--a Providence, Rhode Island, glass sculptor who recently turned to designing public plazas--to produce a plan for Calle Aramburu, a teeming residential street in the dense nineteenth-century Centro Habana district. Ben Tré describes his charge principally as "to alter the way automobiles work in the streetscape." He designed a scheme of slightly raised crosswalks that would discourage non-local traffic and make the occasional presence of cars immediately obvious. "The project will give physical support to a spontaneous pattern in that area where neighbors live in the streets--probably because of overcrowding inside their dwellings, but also as typical extroverts," Coyula says. "We picked Aramburu because there is a neighborhood transformation workshop, which provides a good link with the local residents--something we feel is determinate if any project like this looks for success." Ben Tré finds Cuban planners very well informed but handicapped by the lack of resources: "I'm saying, 'We've got to replace these telephone poles with trees.' But how are they going to do that? They're not going to bury the power lines--it's expensive. So now we're talking about hanging them off the building; Cubans are pretty resourceful. "Havana is at an incredible moment in terms of what the city is going to look like," he adds. "Developers from Europe come in who want to build forty stories high, and they say, 'You want milk for your children? Let us do it.' Fortunately they have only a few of those hideous new hotels that come in containers--so far." The prospect of normalized relations with the United States, and the destabilizing flood of dollars that could follow, is sobering. But on this Duany strikes a calming note. "The bureaucracy there is very sensitized and sophisticated," he says. "They know what they have. Bureaucracies don't change. Who's going to replace them?" Duany sees Havana as a prototype for the twenty-first century. "All the cities I've been working in have as their vision what Havana already has: streets that are walkable, mixed use, compactness. Cuba is so far behind in the provision of cars that it would bankrupt the country to become a car society. And in a way, they haven't crumbed themselves up with outmoded infrastructure. So it's perfectly poised to leap ahead." Jonathan Lerner writes on travel and design for Hemispheres, InStyle, and Travel & Leisure. His novel Caught in a Still Place is available in print-on-demand at www.penpowerpublishing.com. |
