On the road from the airport to the city centre of Havana, you drive past sentry boxes on the side or the centre of the road. Are these part of a defensive military system? No, they are part of he water system to the city. Considered one of the wonders of Cuban engineering, the Acueducto […]
The oldest of Cuba’s 60 universities, and the third-oldest in Latin America, the Universidad de la Habana (University of Havana) was founded in 1721 by Pope Innocent XIII and King Philip V of Spain, originally being housed in 1728 in the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo in the Old Town of Havana. No doubt looking […]
The centre of Havana is busy with construction as it continues to regenerate and invest in quality hotels for the growing number of visitors to the city. The Government is refurbishing the Capital Building is following on from the noteworthy restoration of the Teatro Marti and the Gran Teatro de La Habana <Alicia Alonso> and there are new […]
A ruined shell for 40 years behind its protected neo-classical façade, the Teatro Marti in the centre of Havana was faithfully restored and re-opened in 2014. Originally opened in 1884, it was a popular venue in which to premier Cuban “zarzuelas” (musical comedies that preceded caberets) and for “Teatro Bufo” (satirical plays that often mocked the Spanish government of the […]
It is 14 years since I last attended a performance at the Gran Teatro de La Havana; it was showing its age then and the lighting was rather dull. It has now been spectacularly transformed in a three year refurbishment that has opened up the foyer spaces with a new bar and space for art […]
Adjacent to the restaurant/bar El Cocinero, the other part of the project which transforms the former cooking oil factory in Vedado in Havana is La Fabrica del Arte Cubano, where a wide variety of arts, drinking and eating all combine together into a fantastically vibrant place, open from 8pm to 3am and where, at 11 […]
The 100-year old tall chimney of the former abandoned and derelict cooking-oil factory is a landmark on the edge of Vedado in Havana, near to the Almendares River. While proposals have come and gone for decades on what to do with Battersea Power Station in London, now thankfully moving at full steam ahead, the rock, […]
When spring arrives in London, so does the Affordable Art Fair at Battersea. The Fair is firmly embedded in the annual art calendar, yet the first Fair was only initiated by Will Ramsay in 1999 and it now takes place in several locations around the world. In Battersea this week, over 100 galleries are showing […]
The arts are an area where Cuba stands high with the rest of the world. Carlos Acosta, for example, is one of the most eminent ballet dancers of his age and an ambassador for Cuba as he dances across the world, while he is also seeking to establish a ballet school in Cuba, designed by […]
Josu Trueba Leiva is a photo-journalist who studied photography in Barcelona. His work concentrates on social issues such as the squatting movement in Barcelona, the long journeys that the relatives of Basque political prisoners have to undertake to different jails across Spain and France to visit their loved ones and the Punk movement in Cuba. […]
"The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul."
(Thomas Moore)
To be an architect means having a wide range of interests - architecture, art and creativity in all its variety of forms, sustainability, science and innovation. The greatest interest is often where these different worlds overlap and collide - that is when something imaginative often occurs that pushes us all forward to another place
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