Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933-1959

6 Historic Districts: The Regulation of the Past in Habana Vieja

T he comprehensive scope of the Plan Piloto de la Habana, its extension over the entire metropolitan area, depended on a regulatory framework that did not yet exist. It presumed the unification of the city at some level above the existing municipalities, and also presumed the consolidation of the authority of the JNP over rival agencies or interests. In perhaps no other area of the city were the claims as layered as in the old colonial quarter, Habana Vieja. Habana Vieja was the appellation that referred to the area of the city that had been contained within fortified walls. These had been demolished in the middle of the nineteenth century and the land built upon to weave together the intramuros and the extramuros. Major public works such as the Capitolio Nacional and the Paseo del Prado were constructed adjacent to this land in the twentieth century, modernizing the old center without disrupting its colonial core (Figure 6.1). The Plan Piloto de la Habana published by Town Planning Associates on behalf of the JNP proposed a nearly complete rebuilding of this district of the city; it was to be categorized as a sector and connected to the classified road system, with primarily oªce functions housed in linear blocks of high-rise towers and commercial programs on the ground floor of lower residential blocks. Elsewhere in the city new roads would, if realized, have required selective demolitions, and new areas of housing might have established new characteristics of design. But the proposal for Habana Vieja was of a di¤erent degree entirely—the seemingly total transformation of the original core of the city to accord with the norms of the Plan Piloto. The proposal clearly shared premises with the program of urban renewal that developed in the United States following the passage of the Federal Housing 177 6 Historic Districts The Regulation of the Past in Habana Vieja figure 6.1 Ministerio de Obras Públicas, aerial photograph of Habana Vieja (upper right quadrant of image), with the former location of the fortified walls visible as a di¤erent urban fabric, circa 1956. The Capitolio Nacional is the large freestanding building near the center. Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design. Act of 1949; through the lens of urban renewal the wholesale reconstruction of central areas, financed or subsidized by national government, was seen as an ameliorative to urban decline manifest in physical and social conditions. But a concurrent practice increasingly adopted during the 1950s—the establishment of historic districts in city centers—provided another set of premises, a di¤erent lens through which the preservation of historic buildings and neighborhoods was regarded as a brake against urban deterioration. In the context of nationalism , particularly as it emerged after Machado was deposed in 1933 and again following the promulgation of the 1940 constitution, the colonial district of Havana had begun to assume distinct representational value as a container of residual civic history.1 Prompted directly or indirectly by the larger nationalist project, a number of disciplines with historical concerns began to direct attention toward the colonial period. Some of the artists associated with the Vanguardia movement, for example, incorporated details of baroque architecture in creating their new iconography of cubanidad, while ethnographers began to draw associations between the social habits of the colonial period and aspects of public and domestic architecture. Historians of architecture contributed as well. Even some who, like Martínez Inclán, supported the development of modernism in Cuba nevertheless regarded an understanding of colonial architecture as the only route to determine specificities of cubanidad that could be manifested in modernism. Two historians of architecture, Joaquín Weiss and Martha de Castro, published studies of colonial Cuban architecture in 1936 and 1940, respectively, while practicing architects also looked to colonial buildings.2 Among the modernist group, Eugenio Batista by his example encouraged younger architects like Frank Martínez and Emilio del Junco to explore the lessons especially of traditional Cuban domestic architecture. Two other architects, Luis Bay Sevilla and José María Bens Arrarte, who without opposing modernism remained somewhat more reserved in embracing it, made particular contributions to this historical awareness in essays published in Arquitectura and in the daily newspapers. They wrote about colonial architecture in detailed essays that combined a study of formal elements with accounts of historical events and personages to place...