UNFINISHED SPACES + Discussion
This extraordinary film captures a golden moment in Cuban history. In the heady wake of Revolution in 1961, Fidel Castro had a brainstorm while on a lark with Che Guevara at Havana's most exclusive golf club. He decided the space was the perfect spot for "the best art schools in the world." Visionary architects were recruited immediately to create an archipelago of sensuously designed structures. Before long however, Soviet-influenced bureaucrats at the Ministry of Construction decried the inspirational campus as "bourgeois" pretension and building halted. Decades later it lay unfinished and neglected, until Castro invited the exiled architects to return and complete the unrealized masterpiece. Featuring intimate, never-before-seen footage of Castro, Unfinished Spaces is as much about human nature as it is about architecture.
Followed by a discussion with Robert Maxwell
Counting the Royal Festival Hall's iconic river facade amongst his high profile London buildings, Robert Maxwell has combined architectural practice with writing, teaching and criticism for over 50 years. He became Professor of Architecture at the Bartlett, then Dean of Architecture at Princeton University in 1982 where he is now Emeritus Professor of Architecture.