REVOLUTIONARY CUBAN ARCHITECT VISITS BATH

Bath University's Martin Gledhill in conversation with Ricardo Porro yesterday.

I was moved, inspired and maybe a little provoked by the showing yesterday of the film Unfinished Spaces at the Bath Film Festival.

Released last year, and directed by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray, it described the National Art School in Havana, Cuba, which was commissioned directly by Fidel Castro in 1961 to be the "most beautiful art school in the world".

What made the occasion yesterday especially memorable was that Bath University's architecture school had sponsored one of the scheme's three principal architects, Ricardo Porro (now 87), to attend the showing and to answer questions afterwards.

The National Art School was built on a Batista-era golf course, and the three lead architects - the Cubans Porro and Roberto Gottardi, and Italian Vittorio Garatti - had to prepare their preliminary designs in only a few weeks.  They chose to divide the complex into five 'faculties' which they then worked up in makeshift ateliers, using architectural students as design collaborators.  The process was clearly infused with creative energy, and they saw the sculptural, organic compositions as appropriate to the optimism of the Revolution of just two years earlier.

I wondered what were the inspirations for these forms, and how might they be connected to globalised architectural development at the time?  The film placed great emphasis on the anthropomorphic elements such as breasts, buttocks and Porro's vagina-like fountain sculpture; we were also told of the 'Catalan vaults' which the team used when they could not get the materials to build out of concrete - but we were not told about Porro's postgraduate education at the Sorbonne in the early 1950s, in which he must have had an intimate knowledge of the increasingly organic post-war work of Le Corbusier or Aalto.  In his discussion, Porro rooted the work in Cuba's African heritage - but it could equally well be argued as belonging to a bourgeois western lineage.

And, as architects who supported the Revolution (Porro said that, as an architect, he made the Revolution), to what extent did they seek to emulate the Russian Constructivists? - judging by the forms, clearly not much, and Porro told us he didn't regard the Constructivists as revolutionary.  However, the mission to develop a new architectural language appropriate to a new system was clearly shared by post-revolutionary Cuba as much as the Soviet Union - as was the demise of this optimistic creative energy in both countries within a very short time.

By the 1970s, construction on the National Art School slowed down, and was eventually halted, as Cuba turned to industrialised and prefabricated systems of building, and focussed its efforts on 'productive' building types.  The site gradually fell into deep decay (and if you want to know how thoroughly a piece of modern architecture can decay, then steal into St. Peter's Seminary at Cardross, near Helensburgh: the more audacious the design, the more abject it becomes in dereliction).  Porro felt compelled to leave his country, and to practice his art in Paris; Garatti returned to Italy where he never enjoyed the status he had in Cuba: only Gottardi chose to remain in Cuba, where his humble domestic arrangements today are clearly not those of a star.

The film then makes a revelation to the audience, should they not know the twist to the story: thanks to agitation primarily from US academics, the Art School project was rehabilitated, and in the early years of this century, Fidel authorised construction to recommence.  There were some intensely moving scenes in which the old and frail architects revisited the site.

Any film about architecture is a discourse with its own narrative position, and what came across to me during the showing was the film's sense of the primacy of artistic inspiration; of regret at the wastage of such precocious talent; and a sense of celebration that the buildings might still be 'saved', perhaps as monuments to a clearly 'other' and passed age.  It does provoke questions that other hagiographic architectural films don't:  when is architectural form revolutionary?- when is it bourgeois? - and for me the most difficult to answer is - when the rest of the world recognises such architecture, and films it, and presents it as the work of artistic genius, to what extent is it also appropriating it, and re-presenting it in its own terms?

And - while I'm on the subject - why hasn't the US's African-American President managed to put an end to the blockade his country has forced on Cuba these last 50 years?  That would get the Art School finished.

This material and photo copyright Thom Gorst 2012.