Featuring work by 2013 League Prize Winners:
Luis Callejas, Lcla Office; Brandon Clifford and Wes McGee, Matter Design;
Marc Fornes, MARC FORNES / THEVERYMANY; Rafael Luna and Dongwoo Yim, PRAUD; Skylar J.E. Tibbits, SJET; and Bryan Young, Young Projects.
On view: June 25 — August 1, 2013

On view at:
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
Parsons The New School for Design
66 Fifth Avenue

The exhibition will be open daily 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. and late Thursday evenings until 8:00 p.m. The exhibition will also be open on the evenings of the lectures. Admission is free.

The League thanks the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design for co-sponsoring and hosting the League Prize exhibition and lectures.

For more information about the winning offices and their work, as well as this year’s program theme, Range, click here.

Support
The Architectural League Prize is made possible with corporate support from Dornbracht, Microsol Resources, Monadnock Construction, Inc., Susan Grant Lewin Associates, and Tischler und Sohn; and by the Next Generation Fund of the Architectural League.

Architectural League programs are also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

1.5 AIA and New York State CEUs
The League thanks the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design for co-sponsoring and hosting the League Prize exhibition and lectures.

The second evening of lectures by winners of the Architectural League Prize, features Marc Fornes of MARC FORNES / THEVERYMANY, Luis Callejas of Lcla Office, and Bryan Young of Young Projects. The League Prize is one of North America’s most prestigious awards for young architects. This year’s theme for the portfolio competition, Range, reflects the perception of young architects’ careers as explorations of “potential boundaries with practices that are radical, that search the edges of the discipline to find its limits.”

A reception with the opportunity to view the exhibition will follow the lecture.

For additional information on all 2013 winners of the League Prize, as well as the program in general, click here.

1.5 AIA and New York State CEUs
The League thanks the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design for co-sponsoring and hosting the League Prize exhibition and lectures.

The first evening of lectures by winners of the Architectural League Prize, features Brandon Clifford and Wes McGee of Matter Design, Rafael Luna and Dongwoo Yim of PRAUD, and Skylar J.E. Tibbits of SJET. The League Prize is one of North America’s most prestigious awards for young architects. This year’s theme for the portfolio competition, Range, reflects the perception of young architects’ careers as explorations of “potential boundaries with practices that are radical, that search the edges of the discipline to find its limits.”

A reception with the opportunity to view the exhibition will follow the lecture.

For additional information on all 2013 winners of the League Prize, as well as the program in general, click here.

Campbell Sports Center, Columbia University; photo: Iwan Baan | Click for more images

132nd Annual Meeting
Tours of the Campbell Sports Center will take place following short remarks and the election of officers and directors.

6:30 p.m.
Reception

7:00 p.m.
Welcome
Rosalie Genevro, Executive Director, Architectural League of New York
Joe Mannino, Vice President, Facilities Capital Project Management, Columbia University
Remarks
Annabelle Selldorf, President, Architectural League of New York
Election of officers and directors
Remarks
Maxine Griffith, Executive Vice President, Government and Community Affairs & Special Advisor for Campus Planning, Columbia University
Chris McVoy, partner, Steven Holl Architects, partner in charge, The Campbell Sports Center

7:30 p.m.
Tours with Chris McVoy, Joe Mannino, Olaf Schmidt (associate in charge, Steven Holl Architects), and Erich Ely (Associate Athletics Director for Facilities Operations, Columbia University)

Campbell Sports Center
Designed by Steven Holl Architects, Columbia University’s new Campbell Sports Center anchors the school’s Baker Field Athletic Complex located on West 218^th Street and Broadway.  The 48,000 square foot facility contains training spaces, an auditorium, offices, study areas, and hospitality space. Shaped by the design concept of “points on the ground, lines in space,” echoing sports field play diagrams, the complex’s layered structure is integrated into the site’s distinctive urban setting, framing sports fields and parks as well as the surrounding residential community and transportation infrastructure. For more on the Campbell Sports Center, explore this PDF brochure.

Campbell Sports Center, Columbia University | Photo: Iwan Baan and courtesy of Steven Holl Architects.

 

Campbell Sports Center, Columbia University | Photo: Iwan Baan and courtesy of Steven Holl Architects.

Campbell Sports Center, Columbia University | Photo: Iwan Baan and courtesy of Steven Holl Architects.

Campbell Sports Center, Columbia University | Photo: Iwan Baan and courtesy of Steven Holl Architects.

Campbell Sports Center, Columbia University | Photo: Iwan Baan and courtesy of Steven Holl Architects.

Current Work
Álvaro Siza Vieira
Introduced by Kenneth Frampton and Barry Bergdoll
Discussion moderated by Pedro Gadanho
1.5 AIA and New York State CEUs

This event is co-organized by The Museum of Modern Art, The Architectural League of New York, and Aicep Portugal Global, with the kind support of Tap-Air Portugal and the St. Regis Hotel.

Álvaro Siza Vieira is the most important and influential Portuguese architect. His work has been internationally recognized for more than five decades for its coherent and thoughtful response to both site and history in context. His architecture, spread across the globe, is lauded for its intuitive creative drive and innovative spatial experimentation.

A 1992 Pritzker Prize winner, Siza has also received the honorary title of Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and in 1998 the Praemium Imperiale from the Emperor of Japan. More recently, Siza was awarded the 2009 RIBA’s Royal Gold Medal and the 2011 International Union of Architects Gold Medal. He was a Visiting Professor at the École Polytechnique of Lausanne, the University of Pennsylvania, the Los Andes in Bogotá, and at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University as Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor. He continues to teach at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto.

Kenneth Frampton is Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Barry Bergdoll is The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art. Pedro Gadanho is the Curator of Contemporary Architecture at The Museum of Modern Art.

A livestream will be available here during Tuesday’s lecture, click the play button to start a video feed:

Live from MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater. If you are having trouble viewing the livestream, click here to watch directly from MoMA’s website.

Image Credit: Metropolis Books

A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America
Vishaan Chakrabarti
Introduced by Thom Mayne
1.5 AIA and New York State CEUs

Ticket sale proceeds for this event will help support the League’s online publication, Urban Omnibus. A Country of Cities was first developed as a series of opinion pieces on Urban Omnibus.

Vishaan Chakrabarti will discuss ideas from his new book A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America, published by Metropolis Books. With illustrations by SHoP Architects, where Chakrabarti is Partner, and a foreword by Sir Norman Foster, A Country of Cities argues that, “by removing the legal, economic, and moral imbalances that incentivize sprawl, we can realize a more prosperous, more sustainable and more equitable nation.”

Today, the United States is divided, a country of countries characterized by bitter partisanship, economic decline, environmental degradation and growing social inequity. The same tired debates define our political rhetoric, but little is said about how architecture, urbanism and development — i.e., about the way in which we use land — have fueled this national malaise. Despite all the changes politicians promise to enact, altering our sprawling, gluttonous lifestyle is not among them. Our Federal policies continue to perilously fuel a country of highways, houses and hedges, and we are stuck in traffic while emerging economies are speeding past us. ‘A Country of Cities’ contemplates a different nation, one of trains, towers and trees…Author Vishaan Chakrabarti passionately and straightforwardly advocates for this alternate universe and for the essential precept that cities are the silver bullet for the nation’s — and the planet’s — ills.
-Metropolis Books

Vishaan Chakrabarti is a Partner at SHoP Architects and is the Marc Holliday Associate Professor of Real Estate Development and the Director of CURE, the Center for Urban Real Estate, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

Thom Mayne is the founder of Morphosis. His most recent book, Combinatory Urbanism: The Complex Behavior of Collective Form, serves as both a manifesto on urban design and a look at the office’s urban-scale projects.

(left) A schematic showing the flow of goods to and from Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market; (right) Staircase in the public atrium of the St. Benedict abbey at Vaals, The Netherlands, designed by Van der Laan.

The League is pleased to announce this year’s recipients of Deborah J. Norden Fund travel grants: Jeffery J. Roberson for a project entitled Dom Hans Van der Laan and the Plastic Number and Alice Colverd & Alexander McLean for Tokyo’s Pantry: Tsukiji and the Commodification of Market Culture.

The Deborah J. Norden Fund, established in 1995 in memory of architect and arts administrator Deborah Norden, awards travel grants of $5,000 annually to students and recent graduates in the fields of architecture, architectural history, and urban studies. For more information on the fund and past winning projects, visit here.

Roberson will travel to the Netherlands and Belgium to study architect and Benedictine monk Van der Laan’s development of “the plastic number,” a geometric and proportional relationship that is “premised upon that principle that we can understand and quantify the subjective experience of space.”

Colverd and McLean will map and study Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, which was recently slated for relocation in preparation for the city’s bid for the Olympic games. Their project will document the flows of goods in and spatial organization of the market in its surrounding neighborhood, highlighting “broader shifts in the place of food in the city and the role and relevance of face-to-face exchange.”

Urban Omnibus Block Party 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
A party and auction to support Urban Omnibus, the Architectural League’s online publication dedicated to defining the culture of citymaking.

For more information, click here.

An owner has made bridges crossing a creek near Universidad Nueva Suyapa.

Below, in a text adapted from his 1995 Norden Fund grant report, recipient Timothy Kohut reflects on alternative visions for community development in Tegucigalpa. Read more Travel Reports from other Norden Fund recipients here.

The Latin American people–this poor, exploited, believing people–has taken a great stride forward in the past ten years. The price has been error, impasse, and martyrdom. But this is ever the case when history moves forward. And the trophy has been triumph, and the apprenticeship of the popular masses in the craft of their own liberation. It has been a decade of precious experience, during which the masses have promoted their own march forward themselves, their own historical alternative. Here ‘signs of struggle and hope’ spring up indeed, challenging the pessimism and depressing prognoses of those whose description of the situation and its future has its point of departure (and, alas, of arrival) in analyses churned out in political and ecclesiastical ivory towers. But the true pulse of history can be taken only by listening to the heart of the lowly, so often anonymous, Latin Americans. Here is where we can seize both the old and the new–both what lingers on in the panicky spasms of the oppressor and what is fresh and irreversible: the forward momentum of the oppressed in Latin America.

– Gustavo Gutierrez, The Power of the Poor in History (1983)

Reflecting on the state of the poor in Latin America in the late 1970s, Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez encouraged the oppressed classes to grab the reins of their destiny and begin writing their own history, reforming political and legal systems to guarantee human rights and social justice for all. Despite the encouragement of Gutierrez, reform in Latin America has been slow in coming; the Latin American poor still struggle to achieve a basic level of human dignity. This dignity will come with improved human rights, access to land, decent housing, education, health care, and inclusion in the political system. But the forward momentum Gutierrez observed continues to this day, particularly in large urban centers.

Today, the history of large cities throughout the Third World is being written within marginal communities where the poor struggle for their daily survival. This is a story, and a planning study, about the pulse of urban development at the turn of the millennium, that looks and listens to the “lowly and anonymous” residents of the community of Nueva Suyapa, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, as they struggle to secure a permanent potable water system.

The community of Flores de Oriente, one of the seven politically distinct communities that make up the Colonia Nueva Suyapa.

Honduras: The Context
Honduras suffers from a history of abuse, first at the hands of the Spanish, and later by the land-holding elite and transnational banana companies who owned and controlled huge swaths of the country. Honduras today is wrenched in economic and political struggles that have left more than half of the population poor, landless, and without many of the most basic necessities of life.

Not surprisingly, after decades of instability and insufficient government support for the poor, this landless and oppressed class of people began to take initiative, defining an alternative course to progress. A sea of illegal settlements covering the hills of the capital city, Tegucigalpa, is evidence of these “struggles of hope.” Each one marks the spot where people stood up against a system that did not recognize their needs. Their illegal (and sometimes violent) invasion of privately owned land defied landowners and municipal authorities intent on enforcing the law and protecting the right of private property. Put together, these settlements number more than 200, and those who live in them account for more than half of the capital’s population. The residents of these illegal settlements are known as “marginals” because their encampments, or barrios marginales, lie both physically and economically outside the established norms of the city. Their struggles to move towards the mainstream are long and arduous.

The Problem
The expansiveness of Tegucigalpa’s barrios marginales is daunting. Barrios marginales occupy more than half the city’s land, and illegal developments far outnumber legal ones; the marginal way of building appears to be the norm. The municipal government has not given up trying to enforce its development standards, but it can do little more than attempt to stem the flow of land invasions. Lack of resources has left the municipal government scrambling to provide even minimal assistance to existing communities, and it provides none to the barrios marginales, whose legal status is disputed. Residents of the illegal settlements do not pay property taxes, and this lost revenue leaves the municipality without any capacity to improve infrastructure in the barrios marginales.

(L) This photo, taken in the section of the Colonia Nueva Suyapa known as 17 Septiembre, shows the primitive nature of some shelter in the Colonia; (R) Water is the most critical element in the barrios marginales

Municipal governments recognize that large-scale physical improvements such as potable water systems, roads, and sewers are important, but it is impossible for them to begin construction without outside technical and economic assistance. Any improvements made are financed by the communities themselves, or through donations from international development organizations. Major projects take years to implement. In traditional development models, services are installed first, followed by site improvements at the household level. Without reliable outside assistance, the household becomes the nucleus of physical change in these communities. At this level, each family unit makes incremental improvements to its property as finances permit. A wall here, an extra room there, a small business added on, more durable building materials substituted for the temporary ones. Taken together across blocks and communities, these individual improvements shape neighborhoods. Neighborhoods in turn help shape colonias (larger neighborhoods). Individual household struggles can become collective struggles when the need is great and beyond the capacity of households.

More than any other issue in the barrios marginales, potable water affects the wellbeing of all residents. In fact, the lack of potable water is an issue that affects communities all over the developing world. In Tegucigalpa, water shortages are felt most acutely in the barrios marginales. In 1988, it was estimated that approximately 55% of the capital’s population (303,383 people) lived in informal settlements. Of these, 58% (more than 176,000 people) did not have access to a safe and reliable source of potable water.  In these communities water salesmen (known as aguateros) sell water of questionable quality to residents who have few alternatives but to pay the high prices demanded. Consuming water from unreliable and unsafe sources takes a human toll–dysentery, diarrhea-related diseases, and intestinal parasites are rampant, and infant mortality is high.

Those who live in informal settlements account for more than half of the capital’s population.

International development agencies have established successful programs in Honduras to help the barrios marginales access safe potable water. Many of these programs succeed because they establish partnerships between donor agencies and local leadership groups. In 1987 UNICEF partnered with Honduras’ National Water Agency to form the Executing Unit for Barrios Marginales (UEBM) to implement short-term potable water solutions. The program has succeeded in constructing water systems, but the exploding growth rate of Tegucigalpa’s population has minimized its impact.

The Inter-American Development Bank (BID) has also improved the provision of safe potable water in Honduras. BID has introduced a program in Tegucigalpa called the Office for the Construction of Local Infrastructure (OCIL) to help finance and construct permanent local infrastructure in the barrios marginales. Like the UEBM program, OCIL works through local leadership to carry out large-scale projects. But neither program provides more than superficial support for community organizing; that important and difficult task is left to community leaders, most of whom possess neither sufficient experience in community organizing nor sufficient funds to do the job. Without adequate agency support for community organizing, many projects fail. Residents in some barrios marginales tell stories of false hopes and broken promises. In others, half-built and now abandoned projects stand as monuments to failure, and as reminders to residents of their own incapacity.

The lack of sufficient technical support for communities struggling to develop is one of the crucial aspects of this study. Where many communities struggle and fail without outside assistance, others are galvanized by that challenge, and succeed against the odds. Despite the absence of community development support, some leaders have succeeded in navigating local political waters to effectively build the coalitions they need.

This house, the result of more than 20 years of incremental repairs, is an example of what residents in informally constructed communities aspire to: permanent building materials and some aesthetic expression.

Alternative Visions for Community Development
My study examined a residential mobilization which occurred when a major development institution attempted to construct a water system in one Tegucigalpa community. In this case, the complex collaboration of eight neighboring communities nearly failed when existing political leaders failed to act. In the process, two mobilizations occurred: the first against local leadership, the second to complete the requirements to build the water system. The mobilization against local leadership impacted the local political structure, and in the process exposed flaws in the development policy of supporting agencies, which sets communities like this one up for failure.

My study also examined the political leadership that emerged in the course of this residential mobilization and led the community towards its goal. More than just a heroic story of community development, the study was meant to assess and impact planning policy and practice in approaching participation in large scale community improvement projects. While studying urban development in squatter settlements of Venezuela during the late 1960s, urban planner and anthropologist Lisa Peattie noted that the lives of many people were affected by similar circumstances. She wrote that “these changes in people and in their social environment are more than consequences or peripheral aspects of the economic development process—they are the stuff of which economic development is made, or the process itself on its smallest scale.” Elaborating on this idea, I believe that the changes in people and in their social and physical environments are the “stuff of which urban development is made, the process itself on its smallest scale.” My photos here offer a glimpse of a larger study, and the struggles and achievements of the residents of the Colonia Nueva Suyapa, Tegucigalpa, Honoduras.

Timothy Kohut was awarded a Norden Fund grant in 1995. A complete list of all Norden Fund grant recipients is available here. All images and captions by Timothy Kohut.

Timothy Kohut is currently an architect and senior strategist at Collaborative Project Consulting, a District Strategist for the 2030 District of Los Angeles, and a lecturer at the University of Southern California. Kohut has presented nationally on green building, conducted workshops for Greenbuild, the Los Angeles Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council and the Southern California Association for Nonprofit Housing (SCANPH), and presented for classes at UCLA, USC, and Cal Poly Pomona. Prior to joining Collaborative Project Consulting, Kohut was vice president and director of architecture for Abode Communities, where he was involved in the design and construction of nearly 1,000 units of affordable housing.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of the Architectural League of New York.

(L) Escuelas Nacionales de Arte, 1960-1963 | photo: Paolo Gasparini; (R) Ciudad Universitaria Jose Antonio Echeverria, 1961-1969

Below, in a text adapted from his 1998 Norden Fund grant report, recipient Josef Asteinza considers the architecture of the Cuban Revolution in two projects and their impact on the city of Havana. Read more Travel Reports from other Norden Fund recipients here.

In Cuba in the 1960s, two unusual building projects represented, in different ways, the ideas and aspirations of the early years of the Revolution: the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte (ENA, 1960-1963) and the Ciudad Universitaria Jose Antonio Echeverria  (CUJAE, 1961-1969). In 1999, I traveled to Cuba to study these buildings as well as others built in the same period. My desire to study these projects emerged naturally from three overlapping interests: the role of large-scale projects in the shaping of cities, the experimental use of alternative building techniques in response to extraordinary conditions, and the architecture of Havana.

Every city has its large-scale projects, urban campuses distinct from the city itself, but important in defining it. These complexes can be citadels, universities, or hospitals. They can be temporary, like International Expo sites or Olympic Villages, that later morph into other uses. They are sub-cities in that they have a single purpose and depend on the greater environment; and yet they provide a contrasting texture that helps define an urban identity.

Havana has often been called a polycentric city. Because of its topography and pattern of growth, it has very distinct neighborhoods, each with its own street grid and architectural vocabulary. Starting with La Habana Vieja and extending to the suburbs, Havana’s nautilus shape reads like a chart of architectural tastes and ideas. The relocation of the city center over time to accommodate territorial expansion helped maintain the character of older neighborhoods. But Havana’s overlaying features–its network of fortifications, colonnaded thoroughfares, and malecón or coastal levee–give the city a visual integrity.

They provide a contrasting texture that helps define an urban identity.

In the way that urban complexes break with larger topological patterns, unique shifts in building techniques break with predominant construction methods. In Havana, the primary visual vocabulary of each neighborhood derives as much from the materials and methods of its construction as from the formal intentions of its builders and the spatial organization of its society. In the case of the ENA and the CUJAE, a shift in building technique was also accompanied by a radical shift in intentions and in social thinking that offered its architects an opportunity to express these changes in a new visual language.

By the 1940s, the ideas of the Modern Movement were firmly established in Cuba. In this period and in the 1950s, several buildings demonstrated a confidence in the language of Modernism and, more importantly, a desire to create a distinctly regional design vocabulary. During my stay in Havana, I visited buildings by mid-century architects Mario Romañach, Silverio Bosch, Max Borges, Jr., Frank Martínez, Nicolás Quintana, Ricardo Porro, and Manuel Copado. Their work shares many features, including a play with light and shade, the use of local and standard materials, a contemporary expression of vernacular motifs, and a deep plasticity blending outdoor and indoor space applied to conventional building types such as the suburban house and the high-rise office building.

Escuelas Nacionales de Arte
The buildings that immediately followed the Revolution appeared to attempt something new. Conceived with the freshness of a pioneering enterprise, they were executed on an ambitious scale and delivered utopian ideas with limited resources. Designed by the Cuban architect Ricardo Porro and his Italian colleagues Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti, the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte (ENA) are among the foremost examples. Built on the grounds of a confiscated private golf course in the western suburb of Country Club–today called Marianao–the complex consisted of schools of ballet, contemporary dance, music, plastic arts, and drama. The architects worked individually, each designing one or two schools, but as a group subscribed to a set of guiding design principles including the siting of the complexes according to the existing topography, the use of brick and terra cotta tile, and a timbrel vault construction.

Escuelas Nacionales de Arte: brick and terra cotta tile, timbrel vault construction

Escuelas Nacionales de Arte

Escuelas Nacionales de Arte

Work on the ENA was ultimately halted and the highly idiosyncratic project officially discredited, but not before substantial construction was completed on most of the schools. Each complex comprises a series of buildings–theaters, classrooms, studios, offices, and practice rooms–connected by a series of open-air and covered spaces reminiscent of a traditional tropical city. The building complexes flow along the hilly contours of their park setting. Some of the buildings remain in use today; others lie abandoned. The modernism of the ENA represents a rejection of many of the ideas that propelled the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM). By applying older technologies to new conditions the ENA’s design raised a challenge to then-entrenched notions of linear progress.

Ciudad Universitaria Jose Antonio Echeverria
The CUJAE presents a different kind of dream, no less visionary than the ENA, but more rooted in the prevailing modernism of the time. Located in the south district of Central Toledo, the complex was designed by Humberto Alonso, Fernando Salinas, Manuel Rubio, José Fernández, Josefina Montalván, and others.

The CUJAE, which was inaugurated in 1964, houses the reorganized former School of Engineers, Electricians and Architects, which was founded in 1900 as part of the University of Havana. Programmatically, the new institute comprised six schools: architecture, civil engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and industrial engineering. The campus is divided into five sectors: a central two-pavilion dining sector surrounded by residential, educational, recreational, and building service sectors. Unlike the ENA, the CUJAE is organized on an orthogonal grid that disregards the contours of the terrain, and the buildings hover on pilotis above the landscape.

Ciudad Universitaria Jose Antonio Echeverria, 1961-1969

The most remarkable feature of the CUJAE buildings is their lift-slab construction method, in which each floor slab was cast at ground level, hoisted hydraulically and then pegged in place. The entire giant toy-like construction is evident in its tectonic detailing. Horizontal slabs dominate the overall form, but lightweight in-fill walls in a variety of materials (wood, glass, and metal) and dimensions provide color, depth, and an articulation of program. The buildings are connected by covered walkways that echo the shape of the slabs or by open-air atriums with interior gardens and peripheral galleries on upper levels.

The scale of the CUJAE campus and its remoteness from the centers of Havana, exaggerated by an inadequate transport network, add to its isolation from the greater city. The urban layout is rationalized by function, a key modernist urban planning principle, and the various populations mix in a fluid way.

CUJAE interiors

The CUJAE served as a principal model for educational building throughout the rest of Cuba. What the project suppressed with respect to individual vision, it achieved in feasibility and deployability. In the CUJAE and the ENA, the use of unusual construction methods and engineering styles drew attention to their importance as projects; however, those projects that employed contemporary rather than traditional technologies were in the end favored as much for their semantic value as for their practical benefits.

The ENA and the CUJAE are key projects in the history of post-Revolutionary Cuban architecture. Their roles in later development of Cuba’s building program are significant and their parallels with urban planning and design around the world noteworthy. My travel to Cuba offered me a special opportunity to examine the relationship between architecture and urban design in these two extraordinary urban projects.

Josef Asteinza was awarded a Norden Fund grant in 1998. A complete list of all Norden Fund grant recipients is available here. All images by Josef Asteinza.

Since traveling to Cuba in 1999, Asteinza has been involved in producing three-dimensional digital data models of American cities for Urban Data Solutions, set designs for Moving Theater, and architectural designs for Wank Adams Slavin Architects and Utopus, whose projects include urban design. His trip to Cuba has served as an indispensable point of reference in his architectural, planning and design career, most directly in planning work for Columbia University and for NYU Medical Center.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of the Architectural League of New York.