I spent two weeks in the winter of 2024 walking the grounds of the Escuela Nacional de Arte, the sprawling campus that Ricardo Porro began laying out in 1961 on the site of a former country club in Cubanacán. The parabolic brick vaults of the School of Modern Dance still stand, though their Catalan curves are veined with cracks and the open-air corridors have long since surrendered to tropical undergrowth. What struck me most was not the ruin but the intent — these were buildings designed to feel incomplete, to grow into the landscape rather than dominate it.
A City Learning to Build Again
Porro, Garatti, and Gottardi were all under thirty when they received the commission. The brief was deceptively simple: design a national art school complex on a budget of almost nothing, using materials Cuba could actually produce. Brick, terra-cotta tile, reinforced concrete — no steel imports, no glass curtain walls. The constraint became the architecture. Garatti's School of Ballet, with its sequence of interlocking domes rising from a reflecting pool, reads as both ancient and impossibly forward-looking, a structure that could have been built in any century.