1925-2014

Sculptor, painter and referent of modern Cuban architecture, Ricardo Porro passed away at the age of 89 in Paris – city to which he moved in 1966 due to his differences with Castro’s regime. Born in Camagüey, Porro studied in Havana, and graduated there shortly before embarking on an intense formative journey through France, Scandinavia and also Italy, where he participated in the CIAM congresses, which by then were becoming more critical of the theses of the Modern Movement. Influenced by these ideas, upon his return to Cuba Porro built several houses for well-off families, like Villa Ennis (1953) or Casa Abbot-Villegas (1954), marked by their organicist scheme and to a great extent illustrative of the theses endorsed in an influential article of 1957, ‘El sentido de la tradición’ (the sense of tradition), in which he called for ‘a black architecture.’Around those years Porro taught in Caracas, where he met Raúl Villanueva and two Italian architects – Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi – with whom he built the National Arts School of Havana, his most emblematic work and also the most widely published of Cuban architecture.