Cuba: houses

The eclectic mix of houses in Havana was delightful. Lots of Hispanic influence, not surprisingly. Mostly in stone and plenty of decorative elements. The condition of the houses varied quite a bit. Some were in good shape and consistent style.

Others showed evidence of extra floors being added or inserted.

Since many houses are home to multiple generations, it isn't surprising that more space on the same footprint has to be figured out.

We passed this house at least twice while on the bus. Its dusty rose exterior and long rectangular shape reminded me of a villa in Vittoria, Sicily. Not similar in style or even size but evocative.

Apartment houses varied considerably too.

Courtyard building on the Malecón, near the Hotel Nacional where we stayed.

There was an installation of works by Felipe Dulzaides in a 29th-floor penthouse in the green-and-white building in the background. The show was great and the views were stupendous.

(there was an art opening on the third floor of the building on the right so we got to see the interior of that apartment and go out on the balcony for a view over the neighborhood)

The buying and selling of houses is one of the reforms enacted in the past few years with the presidency of Raoul Castro. This may be part of the reason that you see a broken-down house or empty lot left between other houses; no one could buy the lot for (re)construction.

Cuba: overall impressions

Cuba had been on the list of places I wanted to go for a long time, particularly since my co-worker at NYU, Janet Alicea, went in the early 2000s. Then, in 2004, I learned about the National Art Schools in a show at Storefront for Art and Architecture. The buildings thrilled me with their domes and circular plan. My desire increased as my friend Moira Kelly and I discussed going on the SAH trip about three years ago. College Art announced last fall that they would do a trip in May during the Bienal and I leapt at the opportunity. A few days after I sent in my deposit, President Obama announced that the U.S. was finally going to normalize relations, political and socio-economic, after fifty years of enmity and embargo. Since then, Docomomo US has announced that they are doing a trip in October 2015 that I bet will be delightful.

All that excitement and desire doesn't mean I wasn't somewhat apprehensive. It would be my first extended trip to a developing country. I did get to Mexico a couple times when I lived in Texas, once to a conference in Guadalajara and once for a couple hours on my bike, both fairly restricted in space, time, and coverage. This would cover more ground and involve more diverse circumstances.

The guidebooks described the double currency of convertible and common pesos. It seemed confusing but actually works easily as we tourists mostly didn't see any of the pesos that Cubans use. All of my dealings were in the convertible pesos (CUCs, pronounced kooks which was the source of much amusement, as you can imagine). One of our group members bought an ice cream cone when we were at the National Art Schools and that was in street pesos. By the way, it was melting so fast that he lost control and didn't finish it.

Our CAA group included 39 people, including executive director Linda Downs and president DeWitt Godfrey. Alison Fraunhar of Saint Xavier in Chicago, who has published numerous articles on Cuban art, was there for guidance. I would guess that there were slightly more artists than art historians/curators along with other art professionals and assorted spouses, spices, and companions. I was the only man traveling alone but there were several women traveling alone.

As we rode into the city from the Havana airport, I was thinking about how I'd take some photos of old cars and colorful houses, not yet realizing that both of those would be seen everywhere.

The cars didn't always match. The freshly-scrubbed cars seemed to be mostly those serving as taxis for tourists. There were also metered yellow cabs and rather ordinary cabs in various colors and conditions with spoken prices that presumably were negotiable, not that I did any of that. Five of us did take a ride from Casablanca back to the hotel that was faster and more dramatic than we wanted, and expensive to boot. Having survived, it makes a good story. Another time, the taxi ride was slow and you wondered if the driver would get the gears shifted. Fast and slow, a real mix on the streets including the occasional horse cart or farm equipment.

Not all of the houses were this colorful. This one is the doctor's surgery in the fishing village of Jaimanitas, on the outskirts of Havana. When artist José Rodríguez Fuster started decorating his house in homage to Antonio Gaudí of Barcelona, the neighbors asked Fuster to also decorate their house. Now there are several dozen houses and fences with mosaic and painted decoration. Even this street name marker got mosaicked.

I have posted all of my Cuba pictures on Flickr but have lots of stories to tell. I'll try to get some more blog posts done before the memories get drowned in real life. Being there was perhaps transformative. I know we were rich American tourists and our guide was a government employee but I really did feel, through observation and the guide's words, that there was a greater equality and richness and diversity of social interaction than in the US. Perhaps I read too much about income inequality here but we could use a good dose of income compression as long as it was toward the middle. Gretell Sintes (our guide) said that the important people did get better housing but not immense salaries so they don't drive flashy new cars (how can you compete with a '57 Chevy convertible?) or have McMansions. I just realized that I didn't see a single stretch limo full of shrieking tourists. We did, however, go to supper one night in an entourage of old convertibles, honking and yelling at each other and smiling.

Wilfredo Prieto

I just hate it when I go to Havana and they're showing the stuff

I've already seen in Ghent.

Not really (of course). Still, seeing the Wilfredo Prieto show in Ghent while traveling alone last fall was a very different experience from seeing the Havana version of the show in the midst of the 12th Bienal de La Habana while traveling with about three dozen others. Not only that, I had to try to justify his work to Deb and Barbara. In revenge, they started calling me (Insta)Gram, not sure how they got there, perhaps it's the sonorous "rhyming" of Graham and Sherman?

H.W. Wachter

It's quite an extravagance but I love getting the volumes of the Buildings of the United States as they are published. The series is published by the Society of Architectural Historians and was inspired by the Buildings of England series by Nikolaus Pevsner and others. The volume I got most recently is Buildings of North Dakota by Steve C. Martens and Ronald H.L.M. Ramsay. You're laughing and the authors do address, in the introduction, the probability that you all don't think about architecture and culture when you think about North Dakota.

North Dakota is one of the few U.S. states that I have not visited so as I was armchair-traveling through the book, I noticed the United Presbyterian Church in Jamestown. I thought that it looked rather like the church I'd seen in Napoleon, Ohio, as I headed West on my March road trip. The North Dakota church was credited to H.W. Wachter, a Toledo architect. I thought "must be" since Napoleon isn't too far from Toledo. According to the Wachter page on Wikipedia, indeed the Napoleon church is also by Wachter. Both churches are Craftsman in style but the North Dakota church's steeple looks a bit clumsier. Meanwhile, I edited the Wikipedia page to include the North Dakota church; I think that's only the second time I've edited something in Wikipedia and the other time was years ago. Maybe I'm ready for one of those wiki marathons.

First Presbyterian Church

Napoleon, Ohio

(H.W. Wachter, architect, 1900-1901)

thanks, HST

When Harry Truman was elected to a full term as U.S. President in 1948, he and Mrs Truman lived at Blair House while the White House interior was being reconstructed. This was necessary because of deterioration but some argued that the house should be demolished and replaced by a new house, perhaps on a bigger lot. (The photo is from a New York Times article on the reconstruction.)

The new Alfred University president's house, here in Alfred, New York, is a 1960s version of McMansion: too big for its britches on too big a lot, not near campus as the former president's house had been. I think it's good for the president to be in the middle of things rather than up in the would-be suburbs. When Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1967, he and his family lived in the 1877 Second Empire-Italianate Old Governor's Mansion, now a state historic park, for a few months before moving to a Tudor Revival in East Sacramento while a new 8000-square foot mansion was being built in Carmichael.

It's probably more his thriftiness than a devotion to historic preservation but I'm glad that President Truman rebuilt the White House rather than replacing it with a 1950 version of official residence.

Mark Rylance by Dirk Bouts

When I am watching Mark Rylance as Cromwell in Wolf Hall on Masterpiece, I keep thinking how much he looks like any number of men in Early Netherlandish paintings ... not that I can find any real "separated at birth" comparison. You just have to be in love with that melancholy, thoughtful, mask-like but realistic, somber, still portrait style.

This is the "Justice of the Emperor Otto: The Ordeal by Fire" by Dirk Bouts, now in the collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. (Photo from WikiArt) All of these faces are younger. The look is partly in the sad and unrevealing eyes and long straight nose but also in the beauty of the years that show in Rylance/Cromwell's face.

Edward Durell Stone stayed at Malcontenta

When I was in Fayetteville, Arkansas, last month, I was looking at the 2011 book on Edward Durell Stone written by his youngest son, Hicks, also an architect. The older Stone designed the 1951 Fine Arts Center, housing the art library in which I was perusing the book.

I didn't get much chance to peruse the book so I've borrowed it on interlibrary loan. Hicks Stone mentions on page 197-198 that his father was staying at the Palladio villa in Mira, Villa Foscari, known as La Malcontenta, while he and his associates were working on the U.S. Pavilion for the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. Malcontenta is one of my favorite Palladio villas and it is intriguing to think that Stone was working on one of his important projects while staying there for the summer.

Hicks Stone started architecture school at the Harvard GSD in 1979, in the heyday of postmodernism, with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and Michael Graves in the ascendance. When his modern architecture survey professor Alexander Tzonis reached Edward Stone's U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, the class hissed. Though Hicks and his father had been estranged since he was a child, Hicks was amazed, and continues to be amazed, that this early historicism was so derided.

footnote from the road: Iké Udé portrait of the Duncans

As I was driving across Illinois after being in Saint Louis, the NPR station was broadcasting a story about Nebraska collectors Robert and Karen Duncan who commissioned an official portrait from Nigerian-born artist Iké Udé who now lives in New York City. The collectors live in Lincoln and they quoted the director of the Sheldon Museum of Art which I had happily visited on my way across Nebraska.

The portrait on display in the Duncan home. (Photo by Bill Kelly, NET News)

(from the NET Nebraska page)

Frederic Remington

There was a memorial gathering for Winfield Fitz Randolph this afternoon. He had lived in Alfred until his wife Claire died in 2011, after which he went to live near his children in the North Country of New York State (near the Adirondacks, St Lawrence River, and Lake Champlain). Though I was acquainted with his sons and daughter from the 1960s, I don't think I'd seen them since then. Win and Claire were active in the Alfred Seventh-day Baptist Church so I had interacted with them in recent years, being back in Alfred.

The memorial gathering was hosted by the church in the Parish House parlors. I had helped (a little bit) in the setting up and was standing at the side as the folks came from the family graveside service to the reception. A woman came over and asked how I fit in the gathering. "A member of the church?" We got to talking and it turned out very quickly that we had Frederic Remington in common. She (Ann Spies, wife of Peter Fitz Randolph, son of Win and Claire) is on the board of the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York, so she knew about the Amon Carter Museum which has one of the premiere Remington collections. As a matter of fact, back in the 1950s, the Carter had bought a significant number of Remingtons from the Ogdensburg museum which was in great need of replacing the museum building's roof. Note that this was back in the day when museums were not as severely blacklisted as they are now for deaccessioning. The Remington Museum is now doing quite well and Ann spoke highly of the current director. As a further matter of fact, the museum's International Advisory Board is this weekend on a trip to Fort Worth for a gathering at the Carter.

Ann and Peter have lived in New York City so we had that ground to cover, along with "how do you find Alfred after living in the City?" Mostly it's OK but sometimes I really need a big dose of urban.

art and agriculture ... and life and liberal arts

The weekly Bergren Forum at Alfred University is usually held in the Nevins Auditorium in Powell Campus Center. It was displaced to Seidlin Hall 114 this week, for "131: Endeavors in Art & Agriculture" by Cassandra Bull who is working on a bachelor's degree in the School of Art and Design as well as an associate degree in agricultural technology at Alfred State College.

Seidlin 114 is where I had physics in my freshman year of college (1964-1965) with George Towe. He gave us a lot of pop quizzes. One day, he asked us to describe something that related to a campus lecture the evening before. The lecture was unrelated to physics but Professor Towe had been struck by the fact that none of us had been at the lecture. He taught me a lesson about the value of a broad liberal arts education and diverse interests.

It was therefore fitting that Bull's project mixed art and science. For one of her agriculture classes, she had to live with a cow for 24 hours. The hours did not have to be consecutive. At the same time, she had an assignment in an art class to pick 25 words and turn them into a project. Her words:

Watching cows strap into milking machines
I see all the injustice we're told is necessity
As I shovel shit for something I don't believe in

She turned her horror at the dairy industry into a thought-piece on how you live with your concerns, how calves are taken from their mothers, how you mix aesthetics and content, how art and science influence and need each other. Bull made a pair of coveralls from Japanese mulberry stalks (kozo) to wear while she lived with her cow whose "name" was 131. The coveralls quickly became dirty and torn. When the professor Diane Cox encouraged her to continue, she wrote her field notes and statements about her experience and feelings about industrial agriculture on the coveralls. She then did a performance for her class in which she took off her street clothes, put on the coveralls and read the text, and then returned to her street clothes. She showed a video of the performance as part of her presentation today. What a powerful statement it was, picturing her description of the project.

I also could not help but think about some of the things I saw on my March road trip: the feedlots near Dalhart, Texas; the long barns in central Arkansas, presumably for chickens; the cattle and bison in fields in Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Arkansas; the varying landscapes of the U.S. Lots to think about, mostly about how there is no absolute good, that art is mixed with life, that experience is important.