Ricardo Porro, Cuban National Art School Architect

Ricardo Porro, was born on November 3, 1925, in Camaguey, on the island of Cuba. Made his first trip to Europe in 1948, where he studied, among others, at the Institute of Urbanism at the Sorbonne in Paris. He also participated in the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in Venice, graduating the following year at the university's School of Architecture in Havana in 1949. After graduation, Porro travelled to Paris where he meets Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, a figure who influenced him greatly.

Back in Cuba, in 1950, made in Havana his first architectural works for private clients: Villa Armenteros (1950), Villa Ennis (1953), Villa San Miguel (1953), Villa Villegas (1953), the Casa Garcia (1954), the Casa Abad-Villegas (1954), and the Casa Timoteo Ennis (1957). One of the most important references to modernism in Cuba. In the second half of the decade, Ricardo Porro moved to Venezuela in 1957 (with his wife to avoid being arrested for his opposition to President Fulgencio Batista), where he was appointed professor of urbanism and architecture at the University of Caracas. There he met another great influence on his practice, the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, as well as Mr Gottardi and Mr Garatti.

Vernacular expressions

In 1961, in Cuba, at the request of the Castro government, he became the project coordinator of national art schools, which settled on the outskirts of Havana. Ricardo Porro invites adventure to Italian architects Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi. Together, worked feverishly creating small villages of brick and tile, organically snaking through the dense surface, playing at some point what was called the "cubanidad".

That was exactly his intent, Mr Porro recalled in a 2011 interview with The Atlantic. “When I received this commission, I thought there had not been a good expression of revolution in architecture,” he said. “I wanted to create in that school the expression of revolution. What I felt at that moment was an emotional explosion.”

However, the art schools’ distinctive style was officially anathema. “You realize that you’ve been accused of something,” Mr Porro recalled in “Unfinished Spaces,” a 2011 documentary directed by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray. “And then you realize that you have been judged. And then you realize you are guilty. And nobody tells you.”

He was exiled and nationalized in France, where he would continue working as an architect in partnership with Renaud de La Noue in Paris. This period is the Collège les Explorateurs 1996 in Cergy-le-Haut, northwest of Paris. In Paris, he lived until his death last Christmas Day.