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Michael Graves (19342015)05.01.15

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SHORTLY AFTER THE DEATH of Michael Graves I visited one of his first important works: theBenacerraf Pavilion in Princeton, New Jersey. The project, completed in 1969 and one of two by Gravespublished in the book Five Architects, is modest in size but exuberant in form. It confirms JohnWhitemans assertion that the pavilion is the essay form of architecture. For Graves, this smallcommission was an opportunity to comment on the plastic language of Le Corbusiers purist works of the1920s. The subject matter of Gravess built essay is the tension between plane and volume, abstractionand figuration, and the counterpoint between a regular structural frame and the compositional freedom ofwalls liberated from their function of support and enclosure. Benacerraf is early modernism seen througha Mannerist lens; just as Peter Eisenmans work of the same period uncovers an unanticipated complexityin the work of Giuseppe Terragni, Gravess work points to a latent figurality in the abstract language of20s modernism.

Modern architecture never makes good ruins, and Benacerraf is a ruin todaywhich makes it a poignantanalogue to Gravess own passing. (The house is owned by Princeton University, and a project to restoreit in cooperation with Gravess office was on hold at the time of his death.) In its ruined form, Benacerrafseems almost like a provisional construction; it takes on the quality of an abandoned stage set or adeserted holiday camp. It underlines the temporality of the modern, less invested in a durable presenceand more in capturing the moment of its conception.

Michael Graves, c. 1970s. Courtesy Michael Graves Architecture & Design.



In retrospect, it is easy to see Benacerraf as an anticipation of postmodernism, but I think there is analternative construct at work here. Graves and fellow New York Five architects (Eisenman, Gwathmey,Hejduk, and Meier) are marked by their belatedness in relation to the modern project. They were at leasttwo generations removed from the early modern masters. It was as a student at Harvard that Gravesencountered Gropius, but that could only have reinforced Gravess sense that the spirit of discovery hadgone out of the modern project. Unwilling to turn their backs on the modernist legacy, they faced theparadoxical challenge of recuperating the radicality of early modernism at a time when the movementsperiod of innovation had already passed. The Five wanted to return modern architecture to its avant-gardeorigins but were sophisticated enough to understand that such a self-conscious return was entirelyincompatible with the avant-garde impulse. For Graves and Hejduk in particular (who were entranced bythe 20s work of Le Corbusier) that dilemma is particularly stark: Modern architecture presented itself as alanguage that was already complete and fully formed. In Gravess case, the only possibility left open wasthe kind of Mannerist elaboration on display at Benacerrafa desperate attempt to breathe new life into adying system.

Gravess solution in the years to follow was to turn his back on the abstract language of early modernism.He never entirely rejected the influence of Le Corbusier (Im told he faithfully celebrated Le Corbusiersbirthday each year in the office), but just as in his early work he had emphasized the figural aspects of LeCorbusiers work, in later years he saw that work through the lens of ritual, landscape, and primarygeometries. In the entry hall of the Villa Savoye, for example, one of the first things a visitor encounters isa standard ceramic lavatory sink. Historians have struggled to understand what this piece of bathroomhardware is doing in such a public setting. Some point to Le Corbusiers fascination with the objet typeand see it as a kind of Duchampian found object; others see it in terms of functionalism and say it wasplaced there for the chauffeur to wash his hands. Graves saw it as a ritual fountain, like those in thestreets of Rome, connecting Le Corbusiers work back to an elemental historical tradition.

Michael Graves, Benacerraf Pavilion, 1969. Courtesy Michael Graves Architecture & Design.



It was the historicist postmodernist work of the late 1970s and early 80s that brought him wider fame andlarger commissions, but it is important to remember that although postmodernism came to be viewed asconservative, it had its origins in a critique of convention. Graves recounted that when he won thecompetition for the Portland Municipal Services Building, nearly every registered architect in Portlandsigned a letter opposing the building. As late as 1982, postmodernism could still be perceived as a radicalcritique of an entrenched and unexamined modernism.

Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, 1931.



I met Graves in the late 80s, when I was a student at Princeton, where he taught for four decades. By thistime, a hint of the bitterness that marked his later years had already set in. The loss of the Whitneycommission weighed heavily on him, although questions of historic preservation and neighborhoodresistance to the expansion played as much of a role in that decision as the postmodernist language ofGraves proposal. But clearly by the late 80s the tide was turning against postmodernism, and Graves feltincreasingly overlooked by the progressive design community. This was unfortunate, because heproduced some of his most original work in the 80s and 90s. He mapped out an alternative genealogy formodernism, looking to figures such as Gunnar Asplund, Joe Plenik, and Heinrich Tessenow, giving fullrein to his figurative impulse to produce strange and interesting variations on this alternative tradition. Hetook great satisfaction in the work he did for Target and in the idea that he could bring high design to amass market.

Michael Graves was a resolutely visual architect, entirely ruled by the aesthetic and deeply embedded inarchitecture as a discipline. He had limited sight in one eye, which meant he had no depth perception.Conversations with him were disconcerting; he looked at you sideways, his one good eye fixing you withan intense gaze. I think he liked the idea that he saw the world in depthless fragments, like a Cubistpainting. It was his unwavering commitment to the visual that made him such a good teacherhe taughtyou how to look and was open to finding the best in all students work. The notion of a critical practicebaffled him; for Graves the task of architecture was to provide visual pleasure in an increasingly banalworld. Every architect invents a present from the fragments of the past, and Graves worked tirelessly tokeep that disciplinary dialogue alive. At a time when architecture seems to be ruled by the language ofmarketing and demands for environmental performance, his work and teaching are useful reminders thatarchitecture is still a visual art, and it continues to unfold in a rich conversation with its long history.

Stan Allen is an architect working in New York, a professor of architecture at Princeton University, andDirector of Princetons Center for Architecture, Urbanism, and Infrastructure.

Michael Graves, Portland Building, 1982. Courtesy Michael Graves Architecture & Design.

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Michael Graves (19342015)



MICHAEL GRAVES had a very particular terracotta that he liked to use in his renderings. He preferred ashade of pencil manufactured by Derwent which he then muted slightly with a 10 Percent Cool Gray fromPrismacolor. One day he heard that the gray was being discontinued. He promptly rang up the companyand bought as many as he couldboxes and boxes full.

As this anecdote about the tools of his trade suggests, Graves was determined to get things just right. Nomatter what the typologydrawings and models, buildings and interiors, tea kettles and toasters, furnitureand fabricshis works are possessed of complete resolution. Each holds together tightly and brightly, likean exceptionally well-wrapped Christmas present. Yet, like the period in design history that he seemed inso many ways to exemplify, Graves himself is something of a puzzle, hard to assemble into a singlepicture.

Imagine him first as a dashing young American abroad, sketching ancient monuments on his grand tour toRome from 1960 to 1962. Then as a visionary theorist of New Urbanism, working alongside PeterEisenman at Princeton on a grandly unfeasible proposal called the Linear City. This scheme, equal partsLe Corbusier and Superstudio, would have transformed a twenty-mile-long, one-mile-wide ribbon of NewJersey into a unified megalopolis, a completely integrated space for living and working. It would havebeen hypermodern and ultraefficient. In real life, it would have been terrifying. It also suggests just howfearless and ambitious Graves was when he was just starting out.

04.29.15

Michael Graves with the GQ Man of the Year Award, c. 1980s. Courtesy Michael Graves Architecture & Design.

Michael Graves, sketch for Linear City, c. 1960s. Courtesy Michael Graves Architecture & Design.



In the 1970s, Graves developed into a more reasonable sort of modernist, working mostly at a domesticscale. This was the moment when the New York Five (Graves and Eisenman along with CharlesGwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier), or Whites, had primacy in architectural discourse. It was atime of vivid debate, both among the high modernists and their ideological opponents, the so-calledGrays, who advocated a vernacular and contextualist approach. Then came apostasy. In one of the mostastonishing turns in architectural history, Graves became the leading practitioner of the historical,ornamental, and allusive style that came to be known (for better or worse) as postmodernism. Thoughcriticized at the time as a retreat into the past, in retrospect Gravess postmodern work looks astonishinglyahead of the game. Iconic and complexly referential, his buildings of the 1980s seem already primed forviewers armed with the Internet and a smartphone.

Touching down first in unlikely places such as Portland and Louisville, his buildings in the new styleradiated sly intelligence, even as they functioned like gigantic corporate logos. Graves was soon flyinghigh, riffing off Art Deco in commissions for Memphis, Alessi, and Sunar, and carrying out a series ofmajor architectural projects for the Disney Corporation. With the help of gallerist Max Protetch he elevatedarchitectural renderings to the status of fine artworks, and was justly celebrated for his extraordinarydraftsmanship (with lots of terracotta). But this professional success had an equal and opposite effect onhis reputation as a serious architect. Po-mo managed the feat of being simultaneously outrageous andoverly familiar. Though Gravess work was the best of it, he was imitated rampantly, and badly. This stageof his career left an unfair but nonetheless indelible impression of him not as the classicist polymath hereally was, but instead as a cartoonist and the signature architect of late capitalism.

Gravess later years were marked by populist success and personal tragedy. In his prolific product-designwork for Target and JCPenney, the ironies of his career were all in play. Even as he achieved the long-sought modernist goal of bringing good design to the masses, he gave further ammunition to those whosuspected he was more interested in commodities than ideas. Finally, following a spinal infection in 2003that left him partially paralyzed, there emerged yet another Graves, heroic and profoundly humanist.Working from a wheelchair of his own design, he created exquisitely sensitive equipment andenvironments for the injured, ill, and incapacitated. At a time of life when others might have retired fromthe field, he continued to affect the lives of many for the better.

Clearly, Graves was a man of many parts. He liked to keep admirers and critics alike in a perpetual stateof uncertainty, waiting for his next trick. There are many abiding conflicts at the heart of his work, all ofthem productive: between purism and populism, erudition and commercialism, historical depth andsuperficial imagery. That very multiplicity made him the quintessential architect of the late twentiethcentury, though, and at his best, he synthesized these competing impulses into designs of tremendousimaginative power.

In 1999, Graves devised a scheme to scaffold the Washington Monument during a major renovation. Hecame up with the idea of shrouding the obelisk in a sheath of blue mesh, emulating its shape and alsoreplicating (in denotative fashion) the pattern of its stone coursing. Particularly at night, when it glowed likea translucent lantern at one end of the National Mall, the artificial facade was absolutely an improvementon the original. This was the elusive dream that animated so much of postmodern thinking: the promise ofsecond-order experience. The great hope was that through metastructures, we might find a way to livewithin history, without being dominated by its imperatives. Gravess finest work remains a beacon of thathope: a flash of wit, joy, sometimes even perfection, in a decidedly imperfect present.

Michael Graves, Target Toaster-white, 1989. Courtesy Michael Graves Architecture & Design.



Glenn Adamson is the Nanette L Laitman Director of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York,where Michael Graves formerly served on the board of trustees.

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Walter Liedtke took place during my internship at the Detroit Institute ofArts in 1995. Walter came to visit the museum in order to see the new installation of the collection ofseventeenth-century Dutch paintings that I had been working on with the curator George Keyes. Duringthat internship I also developed my interest in Dutch architectural painting, and more specifically with theartist Bartholomeus van Bassen. Walter was, of course, the authority on this subject and during mysubsequent research for my doctoral thesis we frequently discussed matters of attribution and the artiststechnique.

My closest involvement with Walter developed, however, when I took up the position of Curator of DutchPaintings at the National Gallery in London in 1999, succeeding Christopher Brown. At that moment I

Michael Graves, scaffolding for Washington Monument, 1999. Courtesy Michael Graves Architecture & Design.

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Walter Liedtke (19452015)04.21.15

Walter Liedtke, 2007. Photo: Patrice Mattia, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



inherited from my predecessor an extremely ambitious exhibition project, Vermeer and the Delft School,which Walter had initiated. With little experience in organizing exhibitions on that scale and feeling slightlyintimidated by Walters stature in the field, expertise and hisat timessomewhat outspoken character, Ifeared that my role in the project would remain secondary and marginal. My fears, however, quicklyproved wholly unfounded. Walter could not have been a more supportive and collegial partner in thisproject. Even though he was clearly the far more experienced curator and a true expert in the field of artfrom Delft, he immediately treated me as an equal in the project, involving me in the development of theloan list and the subsequent negotiations and inviting me to contribute to the large catalogue. I rememberthat when I asked him how long the entries for the catalogue were supposed to be he responded in typicalfashion: Write as much as you need on the work and you will know when you will be done. Walter wasalways a great champion of scholarship and he felt that an exhibition catalogue should provide ampleroom for it. The catalogue of Vermeer and the Delft School, with its almost 650 pages and more than2,000 footnotes, certainly reflects that conviction! With the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which can affordsuch extensive publications, Walter had also found the perfect employer. For me it was a great privilegeand learning experience to have been involved with this ambitious project.

In the following years we maintained regular contact and we usually met on my visits to New York in orderto share our ideas around projects that we were working on. A conversation with Walter was alwaysstimulating. Particularly given our shared interest in Dutch architectural painting, I greatly benefitted fromWalters knowledge and interpretations. It was both a joy and an intellectual challenge to discuss theideas and often strong opinions that he expressed in conversation, witty lectures, and his characteristicallycarefully worded essays. His elegant appearance, combined with this love to lecture, as his colleagueArthur Wheelock from the National Gallery of Art in Washington put it, could easily be misconstrued as asign of a certain aloofness. But those of us who have had the privilege to know Walter more closely and tohave worked with him experienced an extremely open and supportive collaborator who was always readyto help seasoned colleagues as well as young scholars and curators.

The shock of his sudden and tragic death has strongly reverberated through the world of art-history andmuseums. Personally, I have Walters generosity of spirit to thank for much of my early experience as acurator. I greatly miss his charm, erudition, and friendship.

A memorial event for Walter Liedtke will be held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art today at 10:00am.

Axel Rger is the director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

AL HEARD I WAS GOING TO RUSSIA and asked if he could come along. He had gone there on amotorcycle with his brother a few years before and wanted to go back. He said hed made a film in amental hospital there. How he had managed to get into a Russian mental hospital to film intrigued me.

I was going to make a film on an American trade exposition designed by George Nelson with CharlesEames and Bucky Fuller that was going to be set up in a park in Moscow. This was 1959, when hardlyany Americans had been allowed to spend time or film in Russia. I had planned to make this film bymyself, which was a really crazy idea, armed with only a windup camera and a windup tape recorder.When I told Al that Id love to have him help me but hadnt raised any money and couldnt pay himanything, he didnt seem to care. He wasnt looking for a job. He was in love with going to Russia. Rightaway we became friends. I could see we were going to be partners, not just traveling companions.

So I arranged for his visa and flew to Munich to pick up a small Arriflex so we could each have a camera.You couldnt buy Kodachrome film there, so we brought a trunk full of hundred-foot rolls, which we wouldhave to bring back to the States for processingno processing there either. We would never see whatwed shot until we got back home. I had made a short film, about the elevated trains in New York, butnever a long one like this. How we were going to do it was a mystery, but the idea of making it on our ownand in Russia was enough. And having Al as a partner seemed like a gift from the gods of filmmaking.

Early in June our Russian adventure beganfour months, filming everything we could find in Moscow andbeyond that we thought interesting. The Moscow beach with bathing-suited Russians strewn about, theracetrack with everyone betting like mad, the circus with the world-famous clown, Oleg Popov, Sergey

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Albert Maysles (19262015)04.15.15

Albert Maysles with his first camera, 2014. Photo: Kit Pennebaker.



Obraztsovs puppet theater for adults, local bands playing perfectly arranged Benny Goodman music fromthe 1930s, and even legendary Galina Ulanova doing her famed Swan Lake, which, when we filmed itwith our noisy windup Kodak, got us thrown out of the theater.

Al hadnt had a lot of experience with either the Arriflex or the Cine Kodak Special when we started, but ina few weeks he became expert with both of them. He had a great eye. And he could watch something thatinterested him forever. He was a natural filmmaker.

As we focused on people we saw at the exposition and around Moscow, we made a discovery. Our film,Opening in Moscow, was turning into a documentary, but we needed to hear conversations and seepeople having them. We needed sync sound. My windup recorder had a hard time getting that, and by thetime we had returned home we had determined what would be our next step. And when we had figuredout how to get sync sound and made our own homemade cameras for it, Al and I filmed Primary (1960)with Kennedy and Humphrey, Eddie Sachs racing at Indianapolis, and Al and his brother David had filmedSalesmen (1968).

Somehow it seems to me that a lot of what followed for both of us came out of that summer, our Russiansummer and the film we made there.

D.A. Pennebaker is a documentary filmmaker based in New York. Since 1974, he has partnered withChris Hegedus in Pennebaker Hegedus films.

D. A. Pennebaker, Opening in Moscow, 1959, 16mm, color, sound, 1 hour.

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Jane Wilson (19242015)04.08.15



Jane Wilsons Water Mill studio on eastern Long Island, where she painted for some fifty years, was thesecond-story hayloft of a carriage house that she and her husband, the photographer and critic JohnGruen, purchased in 1960. Spare and smaller than one might expect given the inherent expansiveness ofher canvases, the space was not unlike the studio her fellow artist Fairfield Porter had fashioned forhimself in a stable hayloft behind his house on Southamptons South Main Street, where in the summer of1957 he painted Wilsons portrait.

By contrast, her New York City studio was jammed with paintings and at a far remove from the storiedlight of the East End. One senses that Wilson didnt need to be constantly reminded of nature, that it wasindelibly imprinted on her consciousness by what she called a bred-in-the-bone sixth sense about thevagaries of weather, a legacy of her upbringing in the wide-open spaces of rural Iowa. A brief film clip ofWilson painting (undated but likely from the late 1990s) shows the artist moving deliberately about thecramped studio, from painting table to easel. Its hard to believe that these ethereal canvases, which lookas though they materialized effortlessly out of thin air, are the result of layer upon layer of paint, appliedwith large, loaded hog-bristle brushes, in a full-throttle approach that can only be described as attack.There is nothing subdued or restrained about Wilsons encounter with the canvas, buttressed by anenergy and boldness of gesture more often associated with Abstract Expressionist paint handling. Wilsonachieves that same allover treatment of the canvas while alluding to the rudiments of reality, enabling theviewer to intuit a horizon line.

For Wilson, the landmark 1961 Rothko exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art was a revelation and atalisman. Some thirty years later she recalled that within the rectangle of his canvas was a vast world thatmade her think about landscape in the sense that it was basically a horizontal series of balances andfloating volumes . . . a density of air, adding: These are paintings where there is no scale trigger, not ahouse, not a tree, not a person. Whatever scale is determined by ourselves being a vertical in front ofthem.

In Wilsons paintings, the horizon hugs the bottom of the canvas, giving way above to the full play of lightand color that is the true subject of her work. Even with the specificity of time, place, climate, or seasonconveyed by her titles (End of Winter Water Mill, Midnight: Foggy Moon, Rain: Heavy at Times), thepaintings transcend the particular to intimate the universal. Jane Wilson will be long remembered for thepower and grace of her art, palpable yet ineffable, that essentially reinvented the language of landscapepainting in the late twentieth century.

Alicia G. Longwell is the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator of Art and Education at the ParrishArt Museum, Water Mill, New York, where she is organizing an exhibition for the fall of 2015 titled JaneFreilicher and Jane Wilson: Seen and Unseen.

Jane Wilson in front of her painting, The Open Scene, 1960. Photo: John Jonas Gruen.

Jane Wilson, 1999. Photo: John Jonas Gruen.

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One had of course to be a nationalist, while trying to be a vanguardist at the same time. . . . It wassomething of a tall order, since all nationalism is founded on the cult of tradition, whereas vanguardism, bydefinition, implies a severance from tradition

Alejo Carpentier

THE NORMALIZATION OF US-CUBA DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS will undoubtedly lead to morearchitectural tourism, ending the ignorance of Cuban architectural culture that exists in the US andrevealing key episodes in the Caribbean nations history to foreign architects and scholars for the firsttime. In the late 1950s, a debate prevailed among the very talented group of young Cuban architectsaround the question: Should Architecture express the cultural values of the nation or should Architectureexpress the universal values of an international civilization?

Mario Romaach, Max Borges Recio, and Frank Martnez stand out among the larger of the two groups,which was committed to the rationalist or universal thesis. The nationalist side was taken by RicardoPorro, with his ideas of Cubanidad and the need to assume a new national identity based on the prevalentAfro-Cuban culture, in opposition to the dominant Spanish colonial urban legacy. Porros essay ElSentido de la Tradicin argued for an architecture rooted in indigenous Cuban culture and historyunaarquitectura negraa position influenced by the architecture of his master Eugenio Batista and also thepaintings of Wifredo Lam, a Chinese-Cuban artist whom Porro had befriended in Paris in 1950 whilestudying at the Sorbonne in the Institute dUrbanisme (the pioneer of Venezuelan modern architecture,Carlos Ral Villanueva, had studied there, in 1937). In Paris, Porro became a Marxist, and this epiphanyfurthered his ambition to express in architecture a poetic synthesis of Lo Tropical and Cubanidad. Hewished his architecture to be tectonic syncretism. While teaching in Caracas at the new Facultad deArquitectura designed by Villanueva in 1957, he met two Italian architects, Vittorio Garatti and RobertoGottardi, who had studied in Milan with Ernesto Rogers and were influenced by the rural vernaculararchitecture built throughout Italy that Gi Ponti published in the magazine Domus during the war-torn40s.

Porro began his career during the booming economy of the 40s and 50s in Havana. He belonged to thesecond generation of modern architects there who had the opportunity to build as soon as they graduated,along with such peers as Clara Porset, Mario Romaach, Frank Martnez, Nicols Quintana, ManuelGutierrez, Rafael Portuondo, Gabriela Menndez, Aquiles Capablanca, Max and Enrique Borges Recio,Jose Novoa, Pablo N. Perez, Mario Gonzlez, and Hugo DAcosta-Calheiros. At the same time, manyforeign architects were practicing in Havana. Perhaps the most notorious building that emerged from aforeign practice during this era was the concrete-and-glass American Embassy, 195053, designed byWallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz, architects of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In 1953,this embassy was exhibited in Architecture for the State Department at the Museum of Modern Art. Itwas one of the first of a string of commissions given by the State Department to the best Americanarchitects.

Against this kind of official architecture, in his early houses Porro used curvilinear walls referencing theMambo Modernism [1] prevalent in Cuba during the 50s by way of Morris Lapidus or Oscar Niemeyer.This popular circular motif became the norm in the late 50s. Frank Martnezs brilliant project for theNational Aquarium in Sibarimar, 1959, and his circular supermarkets built on the outskirts of Havana arethe best examples of this moment in the city.

Although he left in 1958 to teach in Caracas, Porro returned to Cuba in January 1959, when he wasassured of the success of the revolution. His dream job, to help build architecture in the spirit of the new,socialist Cuba, began in 1961, when Fidel Castro put him in charge of the design of a new campus for thenational art schools, to be built on the grounds of the Havana Country Club in the western suburb of

Ricardo Porro (19252014)04.03.15

Ricardo Porro, 2007. Still from the film Unfinished Spaces by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray.



Cubanacn. The five schools were conceived during this romantic phase of Castros long regime, whenthe impossible and the fantastic seemed to become real possibilities for his political disciples, goals to bepursued for the inspiration of the very poor. Porro immediately recruited his Caracas colleagues, theVenice-born Gottardi and Milan-born Garatti. The three architects undertook the design and constructionof five separate buildings for the art facultiesnote that a school for architecture is missing from theprogram. Porros two schools, the fine arts school and the school for modern dance, advanced the ideathat vernacular construction, using traditional reinforced concrete, brick, arches, vaults, and domes, wouldcreate an arquitectura negra (Black Architecture) capable of expressing a poesy of light and space yetbuilt by the common laborer without the use of imported technology.

Soon after the Seventh Congress of the International Association of Architects, held in Cuba in 1963, anemphasis on building low-cost housing using Soviet-style standardization threatened the poetic ideologyof Porros Black Architecture that was so beautifully represented by the art schools. Architectural historianand critic Roberto Segre accused Porro of being an elitist, whose work exhibited a narcissistic andegocentric bourgeois formation. [2] The admittedly arrogant Porro had several enemies, and AntonioQuintana, in charge of architectural design for the new Ministry of Construction, saw his organicexpressive forms as decadent. Quintana managed to convince Castro to abandon the project in 1965. Ofthe five schools, only two are still active; the others are overgrown by the abundant urban tropical plantsnatural to the fertile soil of the former golf course. In 1966, Porro and his family moved to Paris, whereAndr Malraux helped him find shelter and work. Most of Porros French projects were built in banlieues ofParis and did not fulfill the promise exhibited by his radical schools of the arts in Havana. He taughtarchitectural history and theory in Paris, Lille, and Strasbourg, and he never returned to live on his nativesoil.

NOTES

1. Eduardo Luis Rodriguez, The Havana Guide, Princeton Architectural Press, 2000, xxv.

2. John A. Loomis, Obituary: Ricardo Porro, 1925-2014, Architectural Record, December 29, 2014.archrecord.construction.com/news/2014/12/141229-Obituary-Ricardo-Porro-1925-2014.asp

Carlos Brillembourg is a principal of Carlos Brillembourg Architects, based in New York City, an editor-at-large for architecture at BOMB Magazine since 1992, and teaches in the Graduate School of Architecture,Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.

Ricardo Porro, School of Plastic Arts at the National Art Schools, Havana, 1965. Photo: Revolution of Forms:Cuba's Forgotten Art Schools, by John A. Loomis, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

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