Lecture by Daniel Taboada
(Senior Architect, Office of the Historian - Havana, Cuba)
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
6 to 8pm
[Image Description: A photograph of a person smiling wearing a white, blue, and off-brown striped shirt sitting in a garden].
Daniel Taboada is an internationally recognized restoration architect - the winner of the Cuba’s National Architecture Prize – and a beloved design educator. At the time of the Cuban Revolution, Taboada was a young architect working at the prestigious firm of Moenck y Quintana. Since the 1960’s, he has been rescuing Cuba’s architectural patrimony, overseeing the restoration of the squares, churches and palaces found within the UNESCO-designated World Heritage site of Old Havana. His historic preservation projects for the Office of the Havana City Historian include such landmarks as the Palace of the Captains General, the Church of San Francisco de Asis and the Convent of Santa Clara.
[Image Description: A photograph from the top of a staircase looking down. Each floor is tiled with a specific square design.]
Taboada is the founder of the annual international conference on Vernacular Architecture held in Havana each spring. He is passionate about the island’s indigenous buildings which inspired Cuba’s modernist architects during their search for a national identity in an architecture that was sustainable within the Caribbean region.
Taboada’s talk set the stage for the September 20th presentation by Havana architects Yilena Feitó and Yoandy Rizo, who discussed their installation and present sketches from Skyline Adrift, constructed at Architecture Omi. Taboada’s presentation provided a context for the Skyline Adrift installation – grounding that exhibition in Cuba’s rich vernacular construction and the subsequent architecture and urbanism of the Spanish colonial past.