Submitted by M.L. R. Grove on Mon, 31/01/2022 - 12:19
The winning article entitled 'Beyond the National Art Schools: Thin-tile vaulting in Cuba after the revolution', was part of Dr Al Asali's PhD work on tile-vaulting design strategies supervised by Dr Michael Ramage. The work in Cuba was made in coordination with Dania González Couret, professor at the Polytechnic José Antonio Echeverría in Havana (CUJAE), and the fieldwork was supported by Faculty Fund and the Boak Fund from Clare Hall College, Cambridge.
The article examined the archives of the Ministry of Construction of Cuba, interviews, site visit, and reversed modelling of building, aiming to show how architects and engineers in Cuba worked around limitation of resources to design and build efficient buildings using local materials. Craft was central to this approach, and building techniques (such as thin-tile vaulting) were celebrated and combined with industrial construction.
Today, questions about mechanised building processes are resurfacing within discussions about cities and the environmental emergency. Perhaps the story of Cuba’s hybrid approach is still relevant as an example of, rather than seeking to replace builders with technology, facilitating the accessibility of technology to builders, bringing together two extremes in design, where the scarcity of resources meets an abundance of solutions. Stories about architects working around material and technology limitations in the Global South need to be heard.
Finally, this study adds to our knowledge of the history of thin-tile vaulting outside its Mediterranean origins. Cuba, moreover, presents a unique case where the state promoted the use of thin-tile vaulting, thus generating a process of research, experiment, and documentation. A future project might compare how builders sought to industrialise thin-tile vaulting in different parts of the world.
Read Dr Al Asali's article in The Conversation about the project
