Download Entropic Tropic. Multiplication of the inner landscape

Entropic Tropic. Multiplication of the inner landscape
After the Revolution, in accordance with the policy of "densing up"
the bourgeoisie, the enfilade was cut up into pieces, with one family
per room. Walls were erected between the rooms—at first of
plywood. Subsequently, over the years, boards, brick, and stucco
would promote these partitions to the status of architectural norm.
If there is an infinite aspect of space, it is not its expansion but its
reduction. If only because the reduction of space, oddly enough, is
always more coherent. It's better structured and has more names: a
cell, a closet, a grave. Expanses have only a broad gesture. Joseph Brodsky, In a Room and a Half When you need to increase the size of your house, and there is no
patio to build upon, no garden to take up, not even a balcony,
when you need to expand and you live with your family in an
apartment, the only thing left to do is to raise your eyes to the sky
and discover that, amidst the height of the ceiling, one could
well fit in another floor, a barbacoa1. You discover, in short, the
vertical generosity of your space, which allows the building of new
houses inside. Antonio José Ponte, An Art of Building Ruins Entropic tropic. Multiplication of the inner landscape, by the Mexican artist Sandra Calvo,
was shown during the XII edition of the Havana Biennale, and went on to receive the
award for best project. It consisted of an immersion into the different ways of inhabiting
residences known locally as solares or ciudadelas2 in the historic quarter of the Cuban
capital. The work shows the radical changes of spaces within buildings, undertaken by the
lodgers in an attempt to expand their miniscule apartments, at the expense of suppressing
1
A kind of improvised garret or minuscule loft, used as an additional living space.
The terms “solar” or “ciudadela” have no exact equivalent in English. They refer to old mansions and
estates built during the colonial period.
2
common areas or partitioning them on the inside, thus allowing for a larger number of
residents. It is an extraordinary case, at once precarious and vital, of the compacting of a
property. The site-specific project is a collaboration between the artist, the neighbors
occupying the estates, and a group of architects and historians, under the curatorship of
Pedro Ortiz-Antoranz. The solar or ciudadela, characterized by huge high ceilinged spaces and large patios, which
seem on the brink of collapsing, used to be mansions during the colonial period, which
were destined for single affluent families and their servants. Since the mid 1800’s and
during the early Twentieth Century, the owners abandoned these small palaces for the more
modern areas of the city, which had landscaped gardens, leading to their occupation by new
tenants which, in turn, gave rise to an initial process of fragmentation and reordering of the
inner structures of the buildings with the goal of housing the rising bourgeoisie and its
various commercial activities. This situation lasted throughout the Republican Era.
However, it was the triumph of the Cuban Revolution that marked a turning point. In the
early 1960’s the Revolutionary State nationalized the properties and instigated their
occupation by families in need of housing. As a result, these buildings suffered their most
profound transformation to date: an improvised, spontaneous, organic, and vernacular
architecture which grew and developed inside the buildings of another age. While walking
through these mansions there is the sense of a severe implosion of the inner landscape, a
sort of tropical matrushka, structures multiplying inside the mansion to create new spaces.
Spaces originally conceived for a single family went on to house up to eighty or ninety,
which, in turn, grew underpinning an architecture in a state of ruin and continued subdiving
the space to an extreme, creating a new house, a bridge, the expansion of a room or a
mezzanine. The dwellers are happy to tell their stories. Let’s take for example, Juan, an exsailor and a resident in San Ignacio 202. Shortly after arriving from the Corps of Guard, he
leans back on the balustrade of his house and points toward the patio of the former
mansion: “All this here are annexes. All these parts which you see did not exist. There
used to be a large courtyard, which no longer exists, all these additions have nothing
to do with the building. The people built them using their own means to solve the
housing problem. To step into the back constructions you must go in one by one...
Armandito, my neighbor, has to carry his taxi-bike up the stairs and over the
rooftops of various houses in order to get to the front door. Right here, there used to
be a spiral staircase. It rotted and broke off. I got tired of waiting for the state to
solve the problem... I brought in an iron ladder from a Romanian ship... you know
those places, just next to the Danube... on the border with Russia. We Cubans are
architects of space, we are builders of space... Now, if heritage gets a hold of this,
let’s say, for a museum, all this goes back to the way it was, or it becomes part
house, part museum. Who knows who’ll remain here. It’s up to us, not only them.
There, as you climb up, there is an old frieze of the building, images from another
time.” Living in the solares creates an intense practice of competition, negotiation and
conflict among neighbors, precariously mediated by the dense bureaucracy of a system that
—as many others do— definitely disguises the overflowing housing needs. In this case, the
more disadvantaged families find ways to get hold of a space of their own by making the
most of every last corner or partition, thus challenging a more static notion of house. Families that have endured prolonged economic crises and extreme material scarcity
tend to take greater advantage of their patrimony. There is a growing pressure to expand —
if possible— or subdivide the living quarters to accommodate more residents. The
courtyard, that common use inner plaza, is occupied by gray cement block rooms or metal
sheet shacks. The hallways are reduced as a result of the expansions undertaken by each
resident. There are situations of extreme reduction of common spaces in which the tenants
need to walk sideways in order to pass through a hallway. The micro-apartments of a new
mezzanine are connected by improvised walkways. The mansion’s courtyard has high
arches which the neighbors have occupied with the so-called barbacoas or lofts. This
phenomenon is the largest transformation undertaken in any house in Old Havana, a
platform subdividing the prop, thus creating two or three new spaces. The barbacoa is
made out of wood or any kind of recycled material at hand and is not merely a spatial
separation. It has completely transformed both the way of living and the cohabitation
dynamics, responding to an immediate need. It derives from constructive methods which
have a life of their own. It is familiar, personal, spontaneous, and makes adding a new
room, a space for a water tank or for storage, possible. According to Orlando Inclán Castañeda, an architect in the Directorate General for
Architectural and Urbanism Projects in the Havana Office of History: “When one sees the phenomenon from afar, one knows that the barbacoa is an
assault on the building. One which places it’s structural stability in danger. But, at
the same time, it is part of the vernacular heritage of the city. It does not have real
recognition, nor will it have. The barbacoa’s insolence in doing without architects
makes us incapable of forgiving it for existing without us. How could we possibly
recognize its value. This endangers it. If the old town is restored, the barbacoa
ceases to exist.” Yamila, a resident of San Ignacio 214, built her barbacoa out of doors, floor tiles
and bricks from a collapsed site nearby: “When one is needy and money is tight one crawls into anything, one invents, one
manages, you become a carpenter, you become just about anything. What should I
bring an architect in for, so he can throw me out and send me far away? No, I’m not
moving from here. The kids’ school is here, the agromarket is here. I don’t want to
live far away, where I’ll have to wait two hours for the bus or I’ll have to pay for a
botero3. There’s nine of us living in this hole. Not all at once, we take turns. There
are no rooms to sleep in, the partitions are improvised with bedsheets, with
cardboard. I made my own barbacoa. I got everything you see here, almost
everything, from collapsed sites. Bricks, blocks, floors. In a collapse you might even
find doors, an armchair. No one believes I made it by myself, but I did, all by
myself, all through hard work. That’s how I was taught in Santiago. Havanans say
3
A collective taxi, usually an old car from the 1950’s.
the barbacoa was invented by us orientals, Palestinians4, because when one comes,
another follows, and then another, and soon the whole family is here... like that song
by the Van Van5: “artisans of space, natural architect... I’m gonna make you a
pretty house, my family’ll know, momma, tell me where you want them to build the
barbacoa!”. The methods of occupation, underpinning, intervention, partition and selfconstruction in these properties have been studied and commented on in detail in the piece
Entropic Tropic. Multiplication of the inner landscape, which looks into these structural
practices which obey more to the organic and immediate needs of their inhabitants, than to
the ideal planning of a house. It is an architecture without architects, made ad hoc,
gradually and cumulatively, with the materials and solutions at hand. Here, camouflage
practices, exercises of intersection, adaptation and expansion of the interior spaces abound;
the boarding up of passageways and windows in order to open new ones; the readaptation
of materials from other collapsed sites. In self-built or squatted houses a simultaneity in the
moments of inhabitation, planning and construction is commonly found. Here, a house is a
living structure, malleable and modular, but also a fragile structure in a state of near ruin, a
space which could be clouted by the same economic, legal, and structural limitations it
manages to avoid, the building stands in an uneasy balance, while the neighbors live in fear
of a collapse and the question of relocation. The solares harbor a life of maximum cooperation, brought about by the unspoken
agreement of helping others who, in turn, will help oneself, be it dealing with water
shortages, fixing a recent collapse, painting the house or taking care of the children.
Collective action becomes essential, although, as in almost all groups, the degree of
commitment and participation is not equal for all, nor does it emerge harmoniously. There
is a culture of the rumba de cajón, of the toques de santo6. The care of the plants that
protect the home, and a care for the others is evident. But the overcrowding in close
4
A term used by Havanians to designate people from the western part of Cuba.
A very well known salsa group, whose lyrics often deal with the toil of life in Cuba.
6
Local celebrations related to orisha practices.
5
quarters, the lack of privacy and forced intimacy, are also the cause of endless problems
and conflicts. Amidst this agglomeration and densification we may find houses of 2.5 x 4
meters where four, five, and up to nine people live. Noises compete with each other, the
constraint of both the physical and sound environment create a life which is always
collective, in which the personal is always public. There is a de facto impossibility of
finding an individual space. Araselio, a resident of Aguiar 408, was having problems with his mother in law and
found an empty area in the back of the building. He consequently requested permission
from the government to build his room-house there: “I wanted my independence, away from my wife’s family. I looked for an empty
area in the building and found it: the hole for a spiral staircase which was no
longer in use since the upper part had fallen down. I asked the state for it, they gave
me permission, and I put together my little house. It was narrow, but I couldn’t
remove the stairs. If I had knocked them down the whole structure of the building
would have gone down, so I used the area underneath to assemble a little living
room and a landing with the barbacoa on top. I made a 3 x 4 room for my wife, my
son, and me. The stairs wrap around the house, they even reinforce it. Here, you
become an architect.” Entropic Tropic is based on field research, a dialogue with the neighbors and an
immersion in the life of the solares. Seven mansions in old Havana were chosen and the
plans for each of their floors obtained, thus identifying their original-initial design in order
to compare it to the present one, underlying the transformations with the testimony of their
dwellers. Each resident drew, in his or her own way, a diagram of their house. Then the
plans for each floor of the mansion were drafted with help from a group of architects and
historians. The residents have taken over the architectural elements, modifying them to a
degree in which it is no longer possible to distinguish if certain columns, staircases, walls,
existed previously, or if they were appended at a later stage. It is also possible to recognize
a variety of materials proceeding from origins other than domestic architecture: a mast from
a ship has been used to connect the different stories of a house; old stones from the wall of
a breakwater destroyed by a hurricane have been reclaimed and used to reinforce the walls
of a house; rusted and abandoned doors belonging to a bank elevator have been employed
to finish a new footbridge, among many other examples. Ana María and Pedro from Aguiar 268, told me: “We needed to melt a small plaque and the slabs were nowhere to be found. They
were tearing up the pavement in all the streets and we found two of those large
wooden cable reels, for telephone cables. We didn’t want to lose any more time, so
we got a hold of one the reels and we took it apart. We got our money and that was
that. Now we’re going back for more reels. We scavenge anything we can, ‘cause
there’s nothing here. It’s the only way to deal... There’s people who live in
residential areas and they’re unhappy, ‘cause that sadness, that darkness, that
loneliness... there’s not even a bus to go to the bakery. Here, everything’s near, you
can even get a planchado7 nearby. It’s not like one of those buildings where
people live behind closed doors. Here in the solares all neighbors live with their
doors open, they join together, whenever there’s any health issue everyone pulls
together. The downside is everyone’s cramped. We’re happy here. Some aren’t.
They’d leave if someone offered them something different. The solar is everything
to me, the rumba, the guagancó, the timbalero. Every single thing comes from here.
For the neighbors it’s a means of having fun. There’s everything here, engineers,
doctors, everything. If the state gave us the resources I’d scramble the whole
building and it’d get it repaired and the whole thing gets dolled up. A doll with an
old woman’s face, but a doll nonetheless. I could dismantle the whole building and
put it back together just the way it was. I don’t need anyone to teach me. My father
and life itself taught me all I need to know.” But there are differing views, such as Ricardo’s and Yayma’s, residents of San
Ignacio 214: 7
A cheap rum favored by working-class Cubans.
“We put in for this house as an expansion. We were packed into the living room
where we slept, it was very hard. They gave us this space and we had to do it all.
Everything’s made of wood, an invention just to stretch out. We got a good amount
of planks and then it was a question of working on mounting the beams and setting
up the suspended ceiling. Do you know where I got the wooden planks? At the
place where they make coffins. I’d gotten no answer... they came out pretty good!
We partitioned the spaces with cardboard shelves, and the other room with pladur, a
gypsum-like material, and we can’t place anything heavy, the building would
collapse. We need to use lightweight materials, polyfoam, steel mesh, lightweight
materials that will hold up and support. Nowadays the solar has been declared
uninhabitable, that is, ground zero. You can’t swap, you can’t do anything, we need
to wait for them to get us into a shelter. We are not actually homeowners, it’s a
contract that we have with the state. It’s a free usufruct, and the Office of the City
Historian probably plans to relocate us, but they’ll send us to Alamar or Cap de
Vila8 or god knows where, and you have to agree to it, because this isn’t yours. We
like living in Old Havana with all its crevices, but if they tell you that they’ll give
you two apartments and that all will be new and you’ll have more privacy, we’d
leave at once. My kitchen and bathroom are part of the common area, the hallway,
but what can you do. This building could be well repaired, but there’s no money.
It’s not easy. Here, everyone holds onto a little patch and fixes up his own comforts.
Osmani built his house in one night, out of cardboard and sheet metal... he got 84
blocks as a gift from someone and we built it on the inside in a single night, so that
the authorities wouldn’t notice. He got the permits after the fact, but down there it
floods and there’s other kinds of water issues.” In Aguiar 408, written down in pencil on one of the columns of the mansion, there
are several histories of the building through time, recording a series of events. The time
when a hurricane knocked down the third floor hallway, the time when Mrs. Gladys’s
flowerpot fell down, the time when the residents got together to fix the hallway, etc. It is a
8
Distant neighborhoods in the outskirts of Havana.
kind of archeology of time, written in pencil on the walls, almost imperceptible to the eye
of a stranger. In Cuba 246 an arch that used to be an old garage has been partitioned into
three micro-homes, put in place and demarcated by a high stanchion, creating three houses
which would seem impossible. Lala lives on top, in a small room with a bathroom, kitchen,
bed and water tank. The space is barely 2 x 2.5 meters. Underneath, on the left, lives
Matilde with her husband, and on the right lives Virginia with her family. The project, exhibited at the Havana Biennale, reconstructs the story of these
mansions and, at the same time, acknowledges the work of the self-builders who inhabit
them. The survey, original and current architectural plans, are accompanied by the oral
history, the recorded discussions, the arguments amongst residents, architects and
historians. The audio testimonials, the architectural plans and the videos present the visitor
with a possible reconstruction of the history of these survival architectures. Several video installations, which act as an expanded documentary, are also
included in the Entropic Tropic exhibit. The videos document the architecture of the
various estates and are projected over materials proceeding from the mansions, which have
been loaned by the residents (tanks used to store water and lime to deal with the saltpeter
that covers the walls, wooden reels for telephone cable recovered from the street, that will
later be used to build the floor of a future room, wooden sticks used to underpin collapsed
areas, salvaged doors and fences, etc.) Likewise, a life-size model in corrugated cardboard of the houses and structures
from these seven Havanan solares is housed in Casa de la Obra Pía, a former solar that,
prior to being restored and reinstated as a museum and cultural center, was on of the largest
ciudadelas in old Havana. The cardboard replicas took over this space to reveal the process
of architectural erasure entailed by the renovation of the Obra Pía house at the time: new
overhanging rooms, staircases and walkways were inserted in its arches. Houses,
bathrooms, and kitchens were built in the courtyard. The common hallways were occupied
and the passageway narrowed, half of the entrance gate was closed off, leaving only a small
and uncomfortable space for the visitor to enter. The corrugated cardboard installations
have taken over the building in the intrusive spirit of informal architecture, experimenting
with duplicate architecture, an architecture within another, thus accentuating the ambiguous
and problematic relationship between the life, framework and content of the artwork.