Eliana Cárdenas ( Havana , 1951 – Madrid , March 4, 2010 ) was a Cuban architect and writer , one of the most important theoreticians and critics of architecture in Cuba , and author of essential titles such as José Martí : architecture and urban landscape (1988). She [2] She stood out as a critic, historian, essayist, poet and theoretician of Latin American Architecture and Urbanism.
Summary
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- 1 Biographical summary
- 1 Professional career
- 2 Latest research
- 3 Academic tour and death
- 2 works
- 3 sources
biographical synthesis
He was born in the city of Havana in 1951, in a simple and hard-working family from the Guanabacoa municipality , where he spent his childhood and adolescence. [3] Her mother was a teacher and she made an effort to transmit her interest in knowledge and culture to her two children ―Eliana and Julio―. So much so that, with this desire, she changed the year of birth of her daughter in the official documents from 1951 (date of birth) to “1950” so that she could enter primary education courses earlier. [4]
Career
She was a doctor in Technical Sciences, professor and senior researcher at the Faculty of Architecture of the José Antonio Echevarría Higher Polytechnic Institute (ISPJAE) in Havana, and collaborator in a variety of universities internationally. [1]
In Cuba , she held various positions, such as director of the magazine Arquitectura y Urbanismo , member of the ICOMOS Committee and vice president of DOCOMOMO. [5]
She is considered the leading historian of Cuban architecture in the second half of the 20th century. [6]
He visited Angola , where he contributed to the foundation of the chair of Theory and History of Architecture at the Agostinho Neto University . [two]
He devoted special interest to Guanabacoa as a professional, studying its heritage and heritage recovery. [3] [7]
Latest research
In her latest research, she paid special attention to the possible contributions that gender approaches could offer to the critical-theory-practice triplet. She was in the last phase of her second degree doctoral thesis. This was reflected in the project The sense of identity in the Havana built environment , where she investigated the role of women as users of architectural and urban spaces. That work was left unfinished by her death. Cárdenas promoted, among other colleagues, research on the role of Cuban women architects throughout history. [8]
In the year 2000 he received the Prize of the Pan-American Federation of Architects in Research and Theory.
Academic tour and death
In 2009 he participated from Havana in the research project Guanabacoa 2025: towards sustainability in defense of identity , carried out between professionals from the Faculty of Architecture in Havana (CUJAE) and the Department of Urbanism of the University of Granada (UGR) . The following year (February 2010 ) she traveled to Spain to participate for two months in a series of research meetings and give talks and conferences in various cities: Granada , Seville , Córdoba , Valladolid and Barcelona .. She was in Madrid with her husband Aramís Alemán, getting ready to take the plane back to her house in the city of Havana, when she suffered a stroke and died ( March 4, 2010 ) , at 59 years old.
Plays
His work can be consulted in the significant number of published texts of his authorship, available in books and magazines. Some articles from the Architecture and Urbanism magazine of the Faculty of Architecture of the José Antonio Echeverría-Cujae Higher Polytechnic Institute are available online.
