-
5 Master Plans: The Retrospective Order of the Plan Piloto de la Habana
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
P aul Lester Wiener traveled to Havana in June 1955 and remained there for the rest of the summer working in the oªce of the JNP; he returned again in the fall, and stayed in Cuba from November through January the following year. During these residencies, Wiener helped devise the initial work program for the divisions of the JNP, specifying what data were to be acquired, what maps should be drawn, and what charts and diagrams should be developed. He also closely directed the design work of two master plan projects: the pilot plan for Varadero was roughly complete and was being refined as a master plan, and the research required for the Plan Piloto de la Habana was under way. Wiener remained in frequent contact with his associates Sert and Schulz at the firm’s oªce in New York, where design work and drawings proceeded concurrently with the work in Cuba. Sert traveled to Cuba for shorter trips in the fall of 1955, and the partners relayed information, requests, and comments in letters, telegrams, and telephone calls to one another and at times directly to Arroyo. Because responsibility for each di¤erent plan was delegated among Mario Romañach, Nicolás Quintana, Jorge Mantilla, and Eduardo Montoulieu, all of whom were established practitioners and therefore more independent than subordinates, Wiener, Sert, and Arroyo in his oªcial capacity provided the links necessary to unify the work as a coherent planning project.1 Their exchanges of notes, memos, and sketches during this period reveal more an environment of design than a directed project. Decisions were made rapidly or else deferred entirely; work often proceeded based on availability of data or political interest rather than in determined sequences; authorship might be provisional or partial as disparate 139 5 Master Plans The Retrospective Order of the Plan Piloto de la Habana elements or di¤erent scales of work overlapped—in all, a set of di¤use circumstances that made evident and more legible the common intentions and techniques that structured the work. During the summer of 1955, work on the Plan Piloto de la Habana focused on the two elements of the master plan defined by Sert: dividing the city into sectors and devising a classified road system. The determination of sectors and roads had two prerequisites: fixing the limits of the metropolitan area and an analysis of the land use within those limits. A preliminary sketch drawn soon after Wiener’s arrival proposed a “perimeter” for an area of metropolitan Havana that encompassed the already developed areas to the west and south as well as less developed land situated southwest of the city and across the bay to the east. An annotation explained the necessity of perimeter limits: “Purpose=limit extension/ check Real Estate & fringe development over 35–50 years.”2 Having diagnosed the rapid, uncoordinated sprawl of new repartos (subdivisions) outward from the city center as socially and economically debilitating for Havana, the architects aimed first to constrain and regulate such elements. In a later exchange of memos, Sert and Wiener discussed how the definition of metropolitan limits could be used as the basis for new legislative requirements. Such legislation would stipulate, for example, that the city authorities would provide utilities only for repartos within city limits; the city authorities had been in e¤ect subsidizing new repartos by supplying utilities even though they had not been consulted during planning stages. More important, the legislation would specify a process by which the consent and approval of municipal government would be required for any new reparto. This process, they argued, would allow the imposition of speci fic design criteria, including the provision of utilities, open spaces, community uses, densities, and building types. They were aware that their proposal required considerable renovation of existing legal structures because the area they defined as metropolitan Havana was in fact composed of di¤erent independent municipalities . These, they suggested, could establish a joint authority that would enact measures to limit the location and design of repartos according to the principles proposed by the JNP and Town Planning Associates.3 Concurrently with the definition of the city limits, the Oficina del Plan Regulador de la Habana (OPRH) compiled an existing land-use map of the metropolitan area (Figure 5.1). This information would be applied to the work of the Plan Piloto, under Romañach, but its early stages were supervised by Montoulieu, an 140 Master Plans...