National Art Schools (School of Plastic Arts)

Fidel Castro chose the site himself, playing golf across the abandoned Havana Country Club with Che Guevara in 1961, and handed the commission for a national art school to three architects in their thirties: the Cuban Ricardo Porro and the Italians Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti. Porro took the Schools of Plastic Arts and Modern Dance, and set them against the International Style, which he read as an architecture of imported capital; the US embargo, which made steel and Portland cement suddenly expensive, pushed the whole project toward brick, terracotta tile and the Catalan vault, a masonry technique that let domes and barrel vaults span without reinforcement. The School of Plastic Arts is arranged as an archetypal African village — a string of oval, top-lit studios threaded along curving colonnades — a form Porro drew from Yoruba settlement patterns and his own reading of Afro-Cuban culture. Political favour turned against the schools within years, construction stopped unfinished, and Porro left Cuba in 1966. Left to decay for decades, the complex was declared a National Monument in 2010 and has since seen partial restoration and renewed use for art instruction.