Travel: Havana, Sustainable By Design
Originally published in enRoute. Read the full text here.
Luis Mario Gell hadn’t planned on returning to Havana. In Rome, where the commercial photographer had lived for a decade, his career had been booming; he shot images for brands like Hermès and Dior. But in 2012, after his brother left Cuba to study as a concert pianist, Gell came home to look after their mother. To make ends meet, the then-34-year-old shot portraits for quinceañeras, 15-year-old-girls’ lavish birthday parties. The work didn’t fulfill him, though, and he dreamed of building an art space instead. “I hoped to capture the youthful energy,” he says. “Coming from Rome, with its Colosseum and forts, I understood that if you want to impress, you must go big.”
The city he’d returned to resembled the one he had left, at least superficially: The streets were grandiose and dilapidated, with the cobblestoned gracefulness of Barcelona, the deco flashiness of Miami and the deterioration of Detroit. Everywhere, the paint – breezy turquoise, yellow and pink – was salt-stained and peeling. It frequently gave way to raw concrete and stone.
But if the buildings seemed tired, there was a new energy in town. The president, Raúl Castro, had reformed the communist system to lift the country’s dreary economic prospects. A robust private sector had taken shape – people were working their own land and eating in family-owned restaurants. There’d been a change of power in Washington, too. Once the Obama administration made it easier for Americans to travel to the island, an influx of visitors appeared – not just people spilling off cruise ships, but also curators, gallerists and design lovers.
Shortly after his return, Gell walked past a mirror factory in Vedado, the neighbourhood where he’d grown up, and saw it was mostly empty. As a child, he and his friends would often visit the building. They’d chase each other through the rafters, and workers would give them little mirrors to take home. Now the staff, which once numbered in the hundreds, had dwindled to fewer than 30, a result of the country’s 1990s recession. The factory, surrounded by apartment blocks and crumbling, colonnaded buildings, was in appalling condition. The roof leaked in multiple places, and trees grew indoors.
Gell negotiated an agreement in 2015 with the Cuban government: They’d rent him the factory and, in return, he’d make structural repairs and allow a small group of workers to continue producing mirrors. He has since transformed the rest of the building into Estudio 50, a multipurpose art space, creative studio, concert venue and beloved hangout for Havana’s under-30 set. The space is open for business, though the architecture is very much a work in progress: Inside, heavy trusses, made of painted wood and weathered steel, support a massive saw-tooth roof. Overhead windows bring in sifted light, illuminating the galleries, and many odd pieces – like a cluster of palm trees growing from bathtubs – are used as surreal backdrops for concerts or music videos.
With Estudio 50, Gell has joined a rising group of young inter-ior designers who are reimagining social and artistic life in Havana. This generation faces formidable odds in a country where capital is scarce and resources even scarcer. The government still tightly controls retail and restricts imports; basic materials like wood, drywall and structural steel are difficult to source. In the market for chic Scandinavian furniture? Don’t get your hopes up. “It’s an everyday struggle,” he says. “To get what we want, we must work with what we have.” For Gell and his fellow Havana designers, though, these constraints are a spur to innovation.
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.