Antonio Quintana Simonetti (1919-1993). Cuban architect and landscaper, forerunner of modernism in the country’s architecture. He is the author of multiple works in Cuba and abroad.
Summary
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- 1 Biographical summary
- 1 Its beginnings before 1959
- 2 After January 1
- 3 Death
- 2 external links
- 3 Fuente
biographical synthesis
Its beginnings before 1959
Dissatisfied from his beginnings as a student with the classical canons, Antonio Quintana participated in 1944 in the so-called Burning of the Vignola , in the courtyard of the School of Architecture of the University of Havana . From this event he began to study the precepts of contemporary architecture . He graduated as an architect in 1944.
From that date he worked, together with the architects Pedro Martínez Inclán and Mario Romañach , in the Barrio Residencial Obrero de Luyanó , south of the bay of Havana . The project, which was carried out according to the canons of modern architecture, had 1,500 homes, eight apartment complexes in four-story buildings and all the complementary services of the homes: markets, schools, sports fields and parks.
Between 1952 and 1958 he participated in various competitions. Through one of them, he designed the apartment building on the corners of 23rd and 26th streets, in the City of Havana ( 1955 ), which constitutes one of the first experiences in Cuba in the construction of two-level apartments (duplexes). . Due to its structural lightness, this building caused a great impact at the time.
A product of these competitions was also the Dental Retreat Building, -today the Julio Antonio Mella building of the University of Havana-, built in 1953 . That Quintana project was the winner among twelve contestants, because in the opinion of the jury, it met the conditions of originality, beauty and practical utility. The building has a two-level parking lot in the basement, a base for shops and an office tower for rent, as well as a small theater room (Sala Talía). In the lobby there is a mural by the renowned painter Mariano Rodríguez ., Human pain. The compact volume of the building and its unitary treatment based on Le Corbusier’s brise-soleil system, expresses to the outside the interior spatial unity in the search for an adequate solution to Cuban climatic conditions, since it interposes, between the exterior and interior, a light filtering element that allows the passage of the breeze at the same time. In 1956 , Quintana received the Gold Medal award from the National College of Architects for this building.
He received another first prize for the Medical Insurance Headquarters Building project -currently the headquarters of the Ministry of Public Health and the Prensa Latina Agency- in Havana City, presented in 1955, which is considered the best commercial architectural work of the 1950s. The work contrasts with the anonymous speculative architecture of that period, and achieves a clear differentiation of functions: offices, shops and apartments, to all of which it gives a value expressive and plastic in the vertical and horizontal circulations, the system of balconies and the exterior galleries. This building evidences Quintana’s research on functional and ecological problems, his kinship with the various currents of the Latin American avant-garde —especially the Brazilian avant-garde movement— and the search for a local expression, linked to the tradition of Cuban architecture, to through the use of color, latticework, window frames and spatial continuity, both in social environments and inside the apartments. The lobby features a mural ofWilfredo Lam
At the national level, Quintana received recognition from the main specialized publications of the time: Arquitectura , Espacio , Álbum de Cuba ; At the same time, his work became known internationally through the book Latin American Architecture since 1945 , published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York , and the Exhibition of Modern Cuban Architecture held in the same city by the Architectural League. . In 1959 he received the Gold Medal award from the National College of Architects and the status of Best Designer of Commercial Works.
After January 1st
After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution , Quintana resigned from the private practice of the profession, worked as a professor at the University of Havana, and took charge of the Directorate of Projects of the Ministry of Construction (MICONS), in which he directed all those that were made in the country, between 1961 and 1969 .
At that stage, he designed and directed, together with Alberto Rodríguez, the construction of a seventeen-story experimental building on Malecón y F, in the city of Havana ( 1967 ), in which he used his experience of the previous decade in the field of the house and applied advanced technologies (sliding mold system combined with post-tensioning of the horizontal structure). In this block, the system of towers and horizontal and vertical circulation galleries, with an independent structure, allows the coupling of various blocks of flats placed in different directions.
In the same decade, he carried out a project for the Wifredo Lam Center , in Old Havana , which contemplated a glass façade that would reflect the Bodeguita del Medio and the Alejo Carpentier Center . In 1969 he worked in the Republic of Viet Nam , where he designed the Tan-Loi Hotel, on the shores of Lake Ho-Tay , in which he left his mark as a landscape designer, adapting to the tradition of light structures in Vietnamese constructions and to the country’s landscape. . The work, whose emphasis was on the relationship between the building and the particular landscape of Hanoi , its lake, its vegetation and its hills, was completed in 1975 .
One of the biggest attractions in Lenin Park
In the 1970s, among other works to provide the city with green areas, Quintana’s team designed the Lenin Park , in which he expressed his concept of architecture as an integrating discipline of the form-function-technology relationship and the economy. . As general designer of the Lenin Park, he designed the entire natural landscape, differentiating the functional environments by their plastic, aromatic and spatial character. With a careful work of nature, he integrated the totality of the works of architecture and two monuments: the one dedicated to Celia Sánchez and the one dedicated to Lenin , on which he worked with the sculptor Lev Kerbel and the carver Pavel Nosov .
The House of the Cosmonauts (1975), conceived on Varadero beach for the rest of the Soviet cosmonauts, has an innovative construction system, for which it made a contribution in Cuba -and possibly in the world-, which consisted of raising a box-beam weighing 1,100 tons at a height of seven meters to hang an entire house from it, in which overhangs of nineteen meters were achieved in the air, from the last support to the end of the building. To obtain this solution, a novel technology was used, consisting of a sheet called fabreca, with a polish that gives it a specular texture. When the hundreds of tons of the box-beam heat up and expand, the house rolls, slides on this support and returns backwards.
The visitors’ house of the Genetic Plan of the Valle de Picadura , built on the very edge of the second highest elevation in the province of Matanzas , also has enormous overhangs, and from its terrace the view reaches as far as the City of Havana. The concrete beams of the cantilevers contract and expand with changes in temperature between day and night. These last two works reveal Quintana’s idea that architecture is a living thing, something that can move and breathe, and to achieve this, technology is necessary.
In 1975 he carried out the project for the Palacio de los Congresos that was planned to be built in the Plaza de la Revolución , which provided for a plenary hall with capacity for 4,500 people, smaller rooms, exhibition spaces and offices; the whole was conceived as a tower and a horizontal block, treated with an exposed stereo-lattice, and clad in glass. The tower, located on a reflecting pool, had to have a central core and a metallic structural system of hanging floors, externally covered with reflective glass.
The Palace of Conventions , in Cubanacán, Havana City (1979), completed for the celebration of the VI Summit of Non-Aligned Countries, constitutes the most complex work elaborated under the direction of Quintana. The team set goals such as the integration of the work to the surrounding landscape, the inclusion of nature in its interior and the possibility of contemplating the exterior landscape from the meeting room -as a way to alleviate the fatigue of those who participate in long working hours of work-; the introduction of elements inspired by Cuban colonial architecture such as hallways, lattices, fountains, wood, red ceramic slabs and tiles, the latter element that integrates it into the landscape.
In the 1990s, he carried out the Heredia Theater project in Santiago de Cuba , in which he worked together with a large team of architects, engineers, and technicians. That was his last work.
death
Antonio Quintana died in Havana City on September 21 , 1993
