R. Segre, La Escuela en Forma.
In less than five years 475 school buildings, housing 210,000 high school boarding students, were built throughout Cuba. How did this constructive dynamics ranging from Junior High Schools in the Countryside (ESBEC) for 500 students to Primary School Teachers Training and Vocational Schools for 4,500 students became possible?
The National Educational Building Group of the DESA (Social and Agricultural Buildings Development Department) under the direction of architect Josefina Rebellón, assumed the responsibility for the design and construction of the new units that rise in the country's rural and urban areas. These allow implementing the new educational principles: linking study with agricultural and industrial labor that determines the location of schools in rural areas next to sugar mills or in agricultural development areas, and the concentration of students in complex nuclei such as the Vocationals and Teachers Training Schools, peripherally located in the provincial capitals.
Which has been the process, contributed by the architects, for generating the solutions that managed within a short time making school complexes one of the most vital and creative expressions of the Cuban Revolution's architecture?
Firstly the architects and engineers from the National School Building Group and DESA developed the Girón Cuban prefabrication system, which consists of panels, woodwork, columns, beams and floor slabs, which is uniformly applied in all school buildings, based on the following premises:
When designing the larger 2,000 and 4,500 student schools, the architects obtained a diversity of solutions and organizational schemes that make each complex a recognizable and distinguishable unit. The formal peculiarity that characterizes the many examples built is accomplished through the application of the following principles:
A team of designers, under the direction of Architect Fanny Navarrete, with the participation of Architects Ledia Martinez and Rafael Barbosa, carried out the smaller scale schools -one thousand students- at Cienfuegos and Matanzas, to deal later with the complexity presented by the Salvador Allende School at Altahabana. This one features an unusual structure, a directrix spine being defined by the dormitories, separated from the classroom blocks, parallel and articulated to each other in a closed plot, which relates to the nearby housing neighborhood.
Fanny Navarrete explains the motivations of the project scheme:
in the Camagüey school, the two parts of the spine -classrooms and dormitories- are articulated at a node, center of social activities: the kitchen-dining room, library and amphitheater. Thus, the transition from one function to another is performed through the center, whose ample gallery -typical transition element- delimits a space that brings together social life -for exchange and communication- of the school's students. There, the increase in size of the annex primary school allowed overcoming the nature of an appendix which it had in the preceding examples, to be integrated within the complex's volumetric system. This relationship assumes a character which is more urbanistic than architectural: a gallery-bridge, located over the road in front of the school, provides the link between both elements.
The Architect Andrés Garrudo, general planner of the schools V. I. Lenin in Havana, Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara in Santa Clara and Karl Marx in Matanzas, who has teamed up with the architects of the provincial groups, Alberto Díaz Serpa, Eduardo Suero, José Cañete, Pedro Baldrich and Gilda López, conveys his experiences as a designer:
These architectural images, in some cases unprecedented for the students, directly affect their awareness of the contrast between old and new urban and architectural structures in which their educational and productive lives take place. It is ultimately the physical projection of that radical change which took place between the old pedagogy and the new teaching methods, of the new totality that the 'social life-education-productive labor' relationship implies.
Let's see the impact of architecture students of the V. I. Lenin Vocational, in their own words:
Orestes Cabañas Rodriguez (eleventh grade). “One aspect I find interesting in the school is that despite its complexity and size it is always perceived as a whole because of its adaptation to the terrain, its height differences and the staggering of buildings. I wish city houses were also tiered.”.
Natacha Medina García (tenth grade). "One of the elements of the school that impressed and interested me the most are the stairs and galleries: the views you have from the balconies in all directions. From there I can see the movement of our peers circulating through the different stories."
Maribel Roque (eleventh grade). “For us, all the school's elements -galleries, bridges, exterior stairs, suspended volumes- are something new, not found in the city and that we could not imagine when we only knew the traditional city.“
These student opinions demonstrate the creative impact of architecture in everyday life when the designer assumes and expresses the new value systems developed by the social culture.
In the subsequent project of the Commander Ernesto Che Guevara Vocational School in Santa Clara, Architect Garrudo introduced some significant changes in order to achieve greater diversification and characterization of the school's functional areas. The most important one is the inclusion of a new Girón system building element that allows articulating the volumetric blocks with a 30 degrees rotation between them, which facilitates multiple spatial directions in the orientation of buildings, thus overcoming the traditional composition about orthogonal axes.
The Máximo Gómez Vocational School in Camagüey, designed by Architect Reinaldo Togores culminates this progressive architectural maturation process. Based on the sum and verification of previous experiences in the use of already defined functional structures, the designer could concentrate on working out the details, in the constructive terminations, in the articulation of the nodes, in the subtle chromatic treatment. The school's smaller size -2,500 students- imposed the concentration of the functional components for social usage around an articulate and stepped plaza, whose complex configuration enables both mass gatherings and individual isolation.
Let's consider the personal experience of Aracelis Varona González (tenth grade): "When I want to rest and think I sit in the park bordering the mass meeting square. Here I find myself protected. It is likely that the park has been designed with this idea in mind, what I like is the way the park's shape simultaneously allows the mass gathering of students and that they may as well enjoy solitude. The park is very cozy."
The relationship established between the sports area, the covered veranda in front of the dining room, the place where the future multipurpose hall will be located and the stepping of the plaza's terrain, creates an area of community involvement that defines the school's vital heart.
There is also an attempt to hierarchize the functional diversity of typical elements: for example, the volumetric accentuation of the laboratories through their stepped perspective which guides the first frontal visual that is perceived from the school's entrance road. Also, the circulation street-bridge linking the classrooms zone with the dormitories conforms an articulation node, whose multidirectional overhangs define a dynamic focal core in a vertical direction which stands out versus the horizontal primacy of the architectural blocks. And finally, the change to the design of the lattices which close the circulation-living areas -lightens the volumetry of the blocks and allows for a greater visual consistency in the exterior-interior relationship.
The national education system has thus found its representation both in the urban and rural territories, in the collection of schools which express the different facets and characteristics in which the possibilities and prospects opened up for young people's technical and cultural development are manifested. In architecture is the implementation of the integrative principles for all scales of design on the humanized scenery and the search for variety in unity. In short, it is the creative response from the designers to the needs of the community.
The evolution of the Vocational School projects demonstrates the maturing process followed by the architects in reaching creative and conceptual and formally elaborate solutions, which meet the school's functional requirements and the vital needs of students, who for years assume the school as the basic container for their educational, productive and cultural life. Architecture is then conceived as the dialectical, dynamic, continuously variable framework, which enables multiple functional alternatives generated by the daily life of diversified students and teachers groups.
Cuban school architecture reflects the vital revolutionary impulse that youth possesses in coincidence with those ideals shaped by a new society. We can then say that architecture is the material representation of the values promoted by the generations born with the Revolution. They constitute forms and spaces that promote the constant creativity of a society in transformation's functions.
The National Educational Building Group of the DESA (Social and Agricultural Buildings Development Department) under the direction of architect Josefina Rebellón, assumed the responsibility for the design and construction of the new units that rise in the country's rural and urban areas. These allow implementing the new educational principles: linking study with agricultural and industrial labor that determines the location of schools in rural areas next to sugar mills or in agricultural development areas, and the concentration of students in complex nuclei such as the Vocationals and Teachers Training Schools, peripherally located in the provincial capitals.
Which has been the process, contributed by the architects, for generating the solutions that managed within a short time making school complexes one of the most vital and creative expressions of the Cuban Revolution's architecture?
Firstly the architects and engineers from the National School Building Group and DESA developed the Girón Cuban prefabrication system, which consists of panels, woodwork, columns, beams and floor slabs, which is uniformly applied in all school buildings, based on the following premises:
- a) use of materials produced in the country;
- b) use of maximum industrialization production techniques experienced in the country and requiring relatively little investment;
- c) use of highly mechanized construction techniques, not requiring an excessive qualification level in most of the workers;
- d) trending toward an open building system that allows its use in the largest possible number of projects.
When designing the larger 2,000 and 4,500 student schools, the architects obtained a diversity of solutions and organizational schemes that make each complex a recognizable and distinguishable unit. The formal peculiarity that characterizes the many examples built is accomplished through the application of the following principles:
- a) the free disposition of the functional blocks according to each school's specific requirements;
- b) the adaptation of their architecture to the surrounding nature and topography;
- c) the architectural blocks' planning articulation;
- d) the identification of functions by grouping elements or by the use of color;
- e) the selection of a particular color range for each school.
The Teachers Training Schools.
In 1972, at the First Congress of Education and Culture, the Deputy Minister for the Education and Culture Sector, Belarmino Castilla, posed the need for 35,000 primary school teachers in order to cope with the student population growth in the subsequent five years. For preparing new teachers, which during the previous decade was done at Minas del Frío, Topes de Collantes and Tarará, new schools for 1,000 and 2,000 students are built in different cities: Pinar del Rio, Cienfuegos, Matanzas, Santa Clara, Camagüey, Santiago de Cuba, Guantánamo, Victoria de las Tunas, Sancti Spíritus, etc. Two of them are located in Havana: the Salvador Allende, the biggest one of the teacher training system in Altahabana, for 4,500 students and the José Martí for 2,000 students in Cojimar.A team of designers, under the direction of Architect Fanny Navarrete, with the participation of Architects Ledia Martinez and Rafael Barbosa, carried out the smaller scale schools -one thousand students- at Cienfuegos and Matanzas, to deal later with the complexity presented by the Salvador Allende School at Altahabana. This one features an unusual structure, a directrix spine being defined by the dormitories, separated from the classroom blocks, parallel and articulated to each other in a closed plot, which relates to the nearby housing neighborhood.
Fanny Navarrete explains the motivations of the project scheme:
"The school should approach the residential area of Altahabana linking closely the teaching zones with the district's annexed primary schools. Hence we oriented the buildings towards the Vento Avenue -which will be crossed by the students by means of a bridge- with a compositional structure that retakes the configuration of the nearby apartment buildings. By removing the boarding students bedrooms linearly, a quiet area opposite the main square of school is created -defined as an interior communication space between buildings- and a separating screen from the Rancho Boyeros road axis, whose characterization based on the industrial facilities, imposes a separation from the school which is achieved by means of the sports areas facing the boarding school's spine."The project group led by Architect Josefina Montalván, was in charge of the Pinar del Rio Teacher Training School, for 2,000 students. Although this complex was not initially conceived as a typical project, it served as the basis for other schools -Santa Clara, Camagüey, Cojímar, Guantánamo, etc.- carried out in a team with younger architects members of the Provincial Groups: Narciso Blanco, Gleida Rodriguez, Oria Mansito and María del Carmen Rodríguez. Two schools with very similar plans were designed within this team, which are distinguished from one another by their relationship to landscape and the use of color: the Enrique José Varona in Camagüey and the José Marti at Cojímar. In them the longitudinal organization of the school's functional elements along an axis or spine persists: lthe first one acts as a background to the Montecarlo urbanization in the outskirts of Camagüey; The second one overlooks the Havana province valleys, located atop a steep hill, made visible in the rural landscape by its antagonistic chromaticity of red and yellow stripes.
in the Camagüey school, the two parts of the spine -classrooms and dormitories- are articulated at a node, center of social activities: the kitchen-dining room, library and amphitheater. Thus, the transition from one function to another is performed through the center, whose ample gallery -typical transition element- delimits a space that brings together social life -for exchange and communication- of the school's students. There, the increase in size of the annex primary school allowed overcoming the nature of an appendix which it had in the preceding examples, to be integrated within the complex's volumetric system. This relationship assumes a character which is more urbanistic than architectural: a gallery-bridge, located over the road in front of the school, provides the link between both elements.
The Vocational Schools
In 1966 Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, in the closing speech of the National Encounter of Monitors, raised the importance of the Monitors Movement and of the Scientific-Technical Interest Circles as factors promoting the youngsters' vocational interest towards scientific and technical careers. Hence the idea of creating special schools emerged, based on new pedagogical conceptions:"...A modern school, a school where conditions are in place so vocations can achieve their maximum development, a school that serves as a reward, which serves as an encouragement for those who have struggled. A school that serves as a vanguard, that serves as a guide, that serve as a model of what should be our country's future schools".In 1972 the design and construction of the first Vocational School, the V. I. Lenin, located in Havana's outskirts begins, later followed by the remaining seven built in all of the current provincial capitals. The dimensions of these centers -mostly for 4,500 students and with about 80,000 square meters of construction- imposes talking more about urbanism rather than about architecture. The diversity of functions they contain and their complexity -laboratories and special classrooms for science education, the industrial area where students work in the manufacturing of electronic equipment, dormitories, sporting areas, cinema, theater, museum, library, etc.- turn them into small school cities which reproduce, in a homogeneous structure, the multifaceted nature of urban life.
The Architect Andrés Garrudo, general planner of the schools V. I. Lenin in Havana, Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara in Santa Clara and Karl Marx in Matanzas, who has teamed up with the architects of the provincial groups, Alberto Díaz Serpa, Eduardo Suero, José Cañete, Pedro Baldrich and Gilda López, conveys his experiences as a designer:
"Designing these schools, the scale of which was superior to all that had been made so far, imposed on us an apprenticeship at the same time the project was being developed, in the search for new solutions that would enrich the complex's spatial and formal results. In this sense, our work was based on an open design method, that is to say not concluding the elements defining process until the very moment they are built, not falling into rigid repetitive patterns, but on the contrary, setting new standards the structuring of the different functional elements -some of them never before included in the traditional school buildings- that would facilitate the the lecture of the functions' specific nature. That is, to obtain a identification by the students of those volumetric components that house the cinema, the gym, the kitchen-diningroom, etc.
A school that contains such a large student population, belonging to different educational levels, imposed on us the need to achieve fluency, the expressive architectural integration of the global social scale. At the same time we should circumscribe each group's activity areas in order to achieve their own identification with forms and spaces belonging to them, that would signal the existence of their educational and generational community within the entire complex".
How were these objectives achieved?
Although the V. I. Lenin Vocational School retains its simple planimetry based on a longitudinal axis formed by the classroom buildings and perpendicular articulations which define the students' dormitories for the different grades of secondary and pre-university levels -from grade 7 to grade 13- the linkages between the buildings by means of external staircases and circulation galleries located in each of the the buildings' stories, creating the "city" effect through transparencies, overlays and perspectives in the different directions. The crossing of galleries establishes a spatial "mesh" while the staggering of certain blocks and the massive classroom volumes, suspended over the common lounge areas, define an urbanistic profile constantly variable and evolving whose daily perception generates a different visual experience of form and space. It is not just the perception of the architectural components: it is also the human dynamics due to the movement of students along the galleries; it is the sight lines into the surrounding landscape; it is the light and shadow which in the day-night cycle transforms images into a continuous positive-negative alternation.These architectural images, in some cases unprecedented for the students, directly affect their awareness of the contrast between old and new urban and architectural structures in which their educational and productive lives take place. It is ultimately the physical projection of that radical change which took place between the old pedagogy and the new teaching methods, of the new totality that the 'social life-education-productive labor' relationship implies.
Let's see the impact of architecture students of the V. I. Lenin Vocational, in their own words:
Orestes Cabañas Rodriguez (eleventh grade). “One aspect I find interesting in the school is that despite its complexity and size it is always perceived as a whole because of its adaptation to the terrain, its height differences and the staggering of buildings. I wish city houses were also tiered.”.
Natacha Medina García (tenth grade). "One of the elements of the school that impressed and interested me the most are the stairs and galleries: the views you have from the balconies in all directions. From there I can see the movement of our peers circulating through the different stories."
Maribel Roque (eleventh grade). “For us, all the school's elements -galleries, bridges, exterior stairs, suspended volumes- are something new, not found in the city and that we could not imagine when we only knew the traditional city.“
These student opinions demonstrate the creative impact of architecture in everyday life when the designer assumes and expresses the new value systems developed by the social culture.
In the subsequent project of the Commander Ernesto Che Guevara Vocational School in Santa Clara, Architect Garrudo introduced some significant changes in order to achieve greater diversification and characterization of the school's functional areas. The most important one is the inclusion of a new Girón system building element that allows articulating the volumetric blocks with a 30 degrees rotation between them, which facilitates multiple spatial directions in the orientation of buildings, thus overcoming the traditional composition about orthogonal axes.
The Máximo Gómez Vocational School in Camagüey, designed by Architect Reinaldo Togores culminates this progressive architectural maturation process. Based on the sum and verification of previous experiences in the use of already defined functional structures, the designer could concentrate on working out the details, in the constructive terminations, in the articulation of the nodes, in the subtle chromatic treatment. The school's smaller size -2,500 students- imposed the concentration of the functional components for social usage around an articulate and stepped plaza, whose complex configuration enables both mass gatherings and individual isolation.
Let's consider the personal experience of Aracelis Varona González (tenth grade): "When I want to rest and think I sit in the park bordering the mass meeting square. Here I find myself protected. It is likely that the park has been designed with this idea in mind, what I like is the way the park's shape simultaneously allows the mass gathering of students and that they may as well enjoy solitude. The park is very cozy."
The relationship established between the sports area, the covered veranda in front of the dining room, the place where the future multipurpose hall will be located and the stepping of the plaza's terrain, creates an area of community involvement that defines the school's vital heart.
There is also an attempt to hierarchize the functional diversity of typical elements: for example, the volumetric accentuation of the laboratories through their stepped perspective which guides the first frontal visual that is perceived from the school's entrance road. Also, the circulation street-bridge linking the classrooms zone with the dormitories conforms an articulation node, whose multidirectional overhangs define a dynamic focal core in a vertical direction which stands out versus the horizontal primacy of the architectural blocks. And finally, the change to the design of the lattices which close the circulation-living areas -lightens the volumetry of the blocks and allows for a greater visual consistency in the exterior-interior relationship.
The national education system has thus found its representation both in the urban and rural territories, in the collection of schools which express the different facets and characteristics in which the possibilities and prospects opened up for young people's technical and cultural development are manifested. In architecture is the implementation of the integrative principles for all scales of design on the humanized scenery and the search for variety in unity. In short, it is the creative response from the designers to the needs of the community.
The evolution of the Vocational School projects demonstrates the maturing process followed by the architects in reaching creative and conceptual and formally elaborate solutions, which meet the school's functional requirements and the vital needs of students, who for years assume the school as the basic container for their educational, productive and cultural life. Architecture is then conceived as the dialectical, dynamic, continuously variable framework, which enables multiple functional alternatives generated by the daily life of diversified students and teachers groups.
Cuban school architecture reflects the vital revolutionary impulse that youth possesses in coincidence with those ideals shaped by a new society. We can then say that architecture is the material representation of the values promoted by the generations born with the Revolution. They constitute forms and spaces that promote the constant creativity of a society in transformation's functions.