Ricardo Porro Hudalgo was a Cuban-born architect, who gave lyrical expression to a hopeful young Cuban revolution in the early 1960s. His residences in Havana are part of the most important works of the modern architecture movement in Cuba. He designed the School of Modern Dance and the School of Plastic Arts. He taught architectural history and theory in Paris, Lille, and Strasbourg.
Education
In 1949 Ricardo Porro graduated in architecture from the Universidad de la Habana (University of Havana) and built his first project Villa Armenteros there. After that he spent two years in post-graduate studies at the Institute of Urbanism at the Sorbonne.
Career
In 1952 Ricardo created in Havana a series of works of architecture: Villa Ennis (1953), Villa San Miguel (1953), Villa Villegas (1953), la casa Garcia (1954), the house Abbot-Villegas (1954) and Timothy Ennis (1957).These residences are part of the most important works of the modern architecture movement in Cuba.
In 1957, Mr. Porro’s clandestine opposition to the regime of President Fulgencio Batista placed him in imminent danger of arrest. He fled with his wife to Venezuela. There he a great influence on his practice, the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva. There he was recruited as a professor of urban planning and architecture in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Caracas.
Following the victory of the Cuban Revolution, Porro returned to Cuba, when he was assured of its success.
His dream job, to help build architecture in the spirit of the new, socialist Cuba, began in 1961, when Fidel Castro put him in charge of the design of a new campus for the national art schools. In this project with his Caracas colleagues, the Venice-born Gottardi and Milan-born Garatti he designed the School of Modern Dance and the School of Plastic Arts.
Soon after the Seventh Congress of the International Association of Architects, held in Cuba in 1963, an emphasis on building low-cost housing using Soviet-style standardization threatened the poetic ideology of Porro’s Black Architecture.
In 1966, Porro fled in exile to France following a political realignment in Cuba, a shift which deemed the architects of Cuba's National Art Schools to be a politically incorrect counter to the Soviet Functionalist building style.
His first work of architecture built in Europe was in 1969, when, at the request of Robert Altman he conceived the L'Or du Rhin center in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.
After that Porro began to work and achieve numerous projects of architecture and urbanism: The Youth House in Vaduz, as well as a Holiday Village on the Island of Vela Luka, Yugoslavia, and the Esfahan villa, in Iran, 1975.
Most of Porro’s French projects were built in banlieues of Paris and did not fulfill the promise exhibited by his radical schools of the arts in Havana. He taught architectural history and theory in Paris, Lille, and Strasbourg, and he never returned to live on his native soil.
His architectural models, made between 1961 and 1980, can be visited at the Museum Les Turbulences FRAC Centre (Fonds Régionaux d'Art Contemporain) of the city of Orleans, France.
In 1991, the French Institute of Architecture organized the important exhibition 'Gros Plan 1: Ricardo Porro. Focus on his works, and architecture projects'.
In 2009, the American director Robert Wilson made an opera based on the life of Ricardo Porro during the construction of the Schools of Art in Havana.
In 2014 he had finished painting a new series of paintings in large format, on a proposal for presentation by Michael Connors to exhibit at the MOLAA (Museum of Latin American Art) in Los Angeles USA.
On 25 December 2014, Porro died at the age of 89 in Paris.
Politics
Mr. Porro’s clandestine opposition to the regime of President Fulgencio Batista placed him in imminent danger of arrest.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Ricardo Porro's father: “Ricardo, I don’t know the future but I know two things: One, you will not study law; and two, you will not die in Cuba.”
Warren James, a New York architect: “In Cuba, Porro took the Catalan vault and made it dance.”
Melissa Mark-Viverito, on the Museum of Modern Art board: “He painted and sculpted with it. In a Caribbean context, with a tropical exuberant landscape, his architecture remains revolutionary.”
Connections
Mr. Porro’s survivors include his wifeElena Freyre de Andrade and their daughter, Gabriela Porro.