In this spring’s “Cronocaos” exhibition on the Bowery, perennial polemic Rem Koolhaas challenged the notion of UNESCO World Heritage sites, suggesting that preservation favors a falsified, vanilla narrative over the true evolution of the built environment.

An evocative new documentary, Unfinished Spaces, continues the debate Koolhaas catalyzed. The film delicately excavates the origins of Cuba’s National Schools of Art, broadcasting a nuanced argument for the necessity and complexity of preservation – one that reveals the many means by which the spirit of architecture persists.

After a New York screening of Unfinished Spaces this week, Architizer contributor Caitlin Blanchfield had a chance to speak with the filmmakers about bringing the Schools of Arts to the screen. Click through for her review and interview.

After tanks rolled into Havana in 1959, Che and Fidel set out assembling their newly liberated state. They commissioned three architects — one Cuban and two Italian — to design what Casto proclaimed would be, “the best art school in the world.” The result was a series of sinuous, earthen forms that house academies for ballet, modern dance, music, dramatic arts and plastic arts. Hewn like Gaudi and curved like Frank Lloyd Wright, the undulations, caverns and vaults of these structures express the near-sexual excitement (and often, as interviews in the documentary reveal, actual sexual excitement) of Cuba in the wake of the revolution. But, as the socialist bureaucracy took hold, artists and architects were painted as flamboyant and bourgeois. As creative license gave way to imposed standardization of construction, the Schools of Art was put on hold, remaining incomplete (though still in use) for the next forty years.

Filmmakers Alysa Nahminas and Ben Murray tell the story of four central characters: the three architects Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi, and Vittorio Garrati, as well as the schools of art themselves. Through the bittersweet — yet jocular — recountings of the designers and the silences left behind in their “unfinished spaces,” we’re shown a moment in Cuban history, a picture of a nation transitioning from revolutionary exuberance to socialist disillusionment. Nahmias and Murray deftly construct the narrative of the Schools of Art from interviews with the architects, students and artists interwoven with shots of the spaces themselves. Light, shadow and the poetry of movement evoke the singularity of the original design, and its ability to still stir artistic creativity.

Below is our conversation with the filmmakers, who were kind enough to answer a few of our questions earlier this week.

How did you arrive at this project? Alysa, you said you had a background in architecture so did you become interested in this through architecture or through film?

Alysa Nahmias: It was more through film making actually. We started the film in 2001 and I got my masters 2003-2006, so it started really with an inspirational story about architecture.

How did you discover the school and these men?

AN: So in 2001 I was on a trip to Havana, I was at the Arts School and Roberto Gottati took me on a tour of the art school and it just blew me away how architecture could be so connected to a political moment and to people’s lives and be so psychedelic—I mean these buildings are kind of psychedelic right?

They are very psychedelic and also so beautiful and organic. I loved in the movie how much sexuality is brought up regarding the architecture, which is embedded in a lot of buildings, but not in such a feminine way.

AN: It’s really in a tactile and figurative way. Ricardo says he’s a figurative architect and not an abstract architect, and I think there’s a lot of repression of figurativeness in architecture. You have Rem Koolhaas’s little buildings where they are like a cartoon character and take on a personality, but in the actual materiality of these buildings they are so sensual.

Ben Murray: I became interested in the project when I saw images of the schools. I thought, “ok this looks good but how do you make a film where architecture becomes a character?” And that’s a great challenge and something that was always one of the elements of the story– the fact that we are working with the medium of architecture and there are not many films on it.

What did you do to convey being in a space to an audience that isn’t actually there and is experiencing it only in two dimensions. Did you have any techniques in filming and editing that allowed the architecture to come out as its own character?

BM: At first when we were shooting we put the camera down on a tripod, and used pans, and tilts, and certain ways to try and add motion so its not a two dimensional flat still image. We did that for several days before we realized, take it off the tripod and move it through the space, and as we started to do that we also put the camera into a slow motion effect. In a way by shooting in slow motion and moving through a space it created this other world, and something completely different than what we had shot in the first place. We paired that with time lapse as a way of showing light passing through that space.

AN: These buildings have a promenade architecture, there isn’t really one angle where you understand them. Porro’s building you have those entrances, but Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garrati their buildings defy this one iconic shot you really have to be inside them moving through them experiencing them over time. Porro’s too but I think especially Garrati’s buildings if you just were to shoot from the outside it doesn’t look like much but when you are in these spaces and moving on top them they come alive.

Did you want to be able to capture a lot of the students and the activity? You said you filmed during the summer when there weren’t as many students around was that a challenge, to get the spaces being used?

AN: It was a blessing and a curse. You could get these gorgeous images of the spaces without interfering with their education. We had enough shots of students in the spaces, but not as many as if we had shot in the school year.

BM: With that emptiness of not having people we were able to highlight nature taking over the buildings. That was another element that was prevalent. We were lucky to be shooting in the summer for better or for worse we were able to not have the distraction of people at times and got to focus on nature and nature moves much slower than people.

Its interesting to see though historical footage as well how its transformed. Is the project now in a stand still?

AN: Yeah nothing has changed as far as the building since we stopped shooting.

BM: It’s a dynamic that’s happening here in the states too– where do you put the limited resources that you have? The economic crisis has hit there as much as it has everywhere else, so for now the schools are stopped. I don’t think it was a political choice I think it was a choice of necessity and out of money, and we are seeing it here everywhere in the states as well.

by Caitlin Blanchfield

posted in Archifilms Video

tagged cuba, film, history, interview, review, unfinished spaces, video

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