Bacardí Building

Bacardí S.A. wanted a headquarters that would double as a corporate emblem, and the young trio of Esteban Rodríguez Castells, Rafael Fernández Ruenes and José Menéndez delivered the fullest statement of Art Deco architecture in Cuba. A riveted steel frame carries twelve storeys and roughly 44 metres, stepped back in successive setbacks until the mass narrows to a belvedere holding the company's bronze bat, the emblem it took as its trademark in 1862. The cladding is a deliberate catalogue of imported material assembled through the port a few blocks away: red granite from Bavaria, glazed terracotta, pressed brick and polychrome tile, with twenty-one varieties of marble inside from Italy, the United States and Spain. Construction ran through 1930 on a site within the old city walls, finishing that December as briefly the tallest building in Havana. Nationalised after 1960, the tower fell into disrepair before a restoration in the late 1990s returned it to use as an administrative building for the Office of the Historian of Havana. It stands within Old Havana and its Fortification System, inscribed by UNESCO in 1982.