Havana Vedado — Revolutionary Architecture
799.00 د.إ
The Vedado district of Havana photographed from above — the eclectic 1950s modernist apartment buildings, the Hotel Nacional, and the grid-pattern streets in the blue hour between day and night reveal Cuba’s architectural ambition.
Description
Havana’s Vedado district — developed in the 1950s as the city’s upscale residential and commercial quarter — represents the highpoint of Cuban modernist architecture: apartment buildings and hotels in a range of international modernist styles (Bauhaus, Art Deco, organic modernism) commissioned by Cuba’s prosperous urban middle class before 1959. The Hotel Nacional de Cuba (1930) and the FOCSA Building (1956 — the third-largest reinforced concrete structure in the world at its completion) are the district’s architectural landmarks. This photograph was made from the terrace of a 14-storey residential building with roof access permission, at blue hour when the streets below have their characteristic combination of functional illumination and residential darkness — the grid pattern of the Vedado urban plan visible in the lighted street lines extending to the Malecón and the dark Straits of Florida beyond.
