Revolutionary ambitions: modernity + utopia in the Ciudad Universitaria José Antonio Echeverria (CUJAE) and Pabellón Cuba of 1960s Havana

In his iconic 1970 survey of architecture during 1960s Cuba – Diez Años de Arquitectura en Cuba Revolucionaria - architectural historian Roberto Segre highlights both the concept of the “revolutionary process” and a “Third World” identity that became central to the high modernist project of the nascent Cuban government. Earlier, upon hosting the 7th annual World Congress of Architecture in Havana in 1963, Cuban officials promoted the island nation as a model for modernist architecture throughout the developing and under-developed world. The new ambitions of the government are perhaps most emphatically expressed in the massive ciudad universitaria projects that spoke to the aims of educating the masses. In my presentation I plan to focus on one of the most significant architectural projects of early to mid 1960s Cuba – the Ciudad Universitaria José Antonio Echeverria (CUJAE) – and place it in dialogue with one of its contemporaneous brutalist companions, the Pabellón Cuba of 1963. As the campus for the national Instituto Politécnico, CUJAE used prefabricated construction and incorporated the plastic arts within its campus, speaking to forebears such as the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas. Housing the schools of engineering and architecture, the role of technology and its synchronism with its tropical landscape are central to the utopic polytechnic university. Often placed in contrast with the now famous National Arts Schools, which utilize anthropomorphic organic form in a more expressionist manner, CUJAE serves as a pointed counterpoint for exploring the role of utopia in 1960s Cuba. The brutalist campus is today eulogized on the 50 peso bill as an iconic architectural achievement of the Cuban Revolution. In my presentation I will explicate the role of the ciudad universitaria within broader historical contexts. First, I argue that such utopic architecture has a historical precedence in Havana, with the university campus being one example of how national identity was expressed via architecture and urban planning throughout the Republican era (1902-1958). I specifically draw from German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s notion of abstract and concrete utopia to differentiate the 1960s architecture from earlier examples in Cuba. Secondly, I plan to place CUJAE within a broader discourse regarding the role of the Revolution nationally and globally. That is, how educational policy and ideas regarding the “New Man” impacted the formation of these new projects, and how they were conceived as models for other “Third World” nations. Discourses regarding the revolution and its ambitions are reverberated in congresses taking place throughout the 1960s, with the brutalist Pabellón Cuba serving as an ideal platform to express Cuba’s contribution to the greater world. In its inaugural exhibition History and Architecture of Cuba, taking place during the 1963 World Congress of Architecture, the massive pavilion served as a stage to present Cuba’s role in contemporary architecture. Built in a mere 72 days, the pavilion itself was an integral part of the exhibition, displaying Cuba’s technological and architectural prowess. Later exhibitions such as El Tercer Mundo, taking place in conjunction with Second Cultural Congress of 1968, speak to how intellectual and political discourse are reverberated within spatial and visual form. Drawing from the third and fourth chapter of my dissertation Revolutionizing Modernities: Visualizing Utopia in 1960s Havana, Cuba, these two icons of brutalist architecture in Cuba make explicit the island nation’s contribution to ideas regarding architecture and society at the height of the Cold War.