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

Epilogue: Futures of Constitutional Modernism

I n the final version, printed at the very end of 1958, the Plan Piloto de la Habana included an alternative organization of the space surrounding the Monumento a Martí on the Loma de los Catalanes. It would have been clear when Wiener, Sert, and Romañach commenced the Plan Piloto in 1955 that the monument designed by Labatut and his colleagues would be realized—its works were already under way—but the normative conception proposed by the Plan Piloto required that this important civic element be somehow assimilated into its encompassing order. Three changes to the actual site configuration were to accomplish this assimilation. First, some ministry buildings originally located as constituent elements of the Plaza de la República might be relocated across the bay to the area adjacent to the new Palace of the Palms. Second, the plaza itself could be connected to the proposed system of linear parks in order to incorporate its distinctive open space into the larger structure of open spaces. Third, most improbable but for the architects perhaps most necessary, the plaza itself could be transformed from an open plaza to a patio plaza in the formal idiom that the Plan Piloto would install in other civic centers at the neighborhood scale. There is no evidence that this assimilation was ever seriously considered, even by the partners of Town Planning Associates, but Sert and Romañach did insert their alternative plan for the Plaza de la República into the final drawings of the Plan Piloto de la Habana instead of using the Labatut, Varela, and Otero plan that was by then actually under construction, and this alternative scheme was plausibly rendered with some degree of precision (Figure E.1). It included the star-plan monument and the Palacio de Justicia correctly positioned, and the buildings for 289 Futures of Constitutional Modernism Epilogue the National Theater, the Tribunal de Cuentas, the Ministry of Communications, and the Library were also shown, although with their position not conforming to the axis of the implemented design. In this version, the main axis from the monument does not bisect the space between the tribunal and the ministry; instead, a secondary axis leads between those two buildings into a secondary plaza space; at the corner of that plaza, an opening leads to a tertiary plaza to the east. The roadway is shown as a high-speed road running to the east of the site (in an area where some buildings already existed) and segregated entirely from the plaza. The enormous and cohesive environment of Labatut’s site plan is rendered in this alternative version as discrete smaller spaces. A large space for public gatherings 290 Epilogue figure e.1 Town Planning Associates and Junta Nacional de Planificación, Plan de Enlaces de Núcleos Cívicos, Plan Piloto de la Habana, 1955–58. Courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design. would still remain in front of the monument, but other areas would be of a di¤erent scale, distinctly urban, designed as hardscape and as buildings rather than as parks. The complex would connect directly to the quadrangles and new landscaped areas of the university and from there to a green boulevard running from Vedado to the waterfront in Centro Habana, completing one of the linear bands of green space to be woven into the city. Drawn in 1957 and 1958, this alternative proposal was merely speculative; though perhaps designed with an optimistic awareness of the transience of public works projects typical in Cuban politics, it was more likely intended to illustrate the conceptual framework of the Plan Piloto and also to evade endorsement of Labatut’s design. It ignores the complexity of Labatut’s conception, which would preclude any such segregation of the design of the monument from the design of its context; an integral connection of the two was necessary to create the “air space” that would in turn produce the desired civic attention. Sert and his colleagues intended to confirm the cohesion of the urban whole by bringing the monument into conformity with their superimposed normative order, but Labatut’s monument was already tightly bound to the broad urban context that surrounded it, by means of a quite di¤erent conception. With the mirador and the radiating pattern of streets below it, but also with the careful construction of the encounter with the monument by pedestrians...