"Havana: The Photography of Hans Engels" exhibition will be on show February 18th-March 15th on the 100 level of Avery Hall
Havana
The Photography of Hans Engels
By Beth Dunlop
In the pages that follow, you will not see an exhibition that is merely about a place, nor photographs that are merely about photography. Hans Engels' study of the buildings of twentieth-century Havana is far more complex and penetrating than that. Indeed, this is an exhibition that deals with a powerful abstract concept: the way in which time affects space. It is a concept that might confound a physicist, much less a photographer. The physicist has the rules of science to help probe the mysteries of this; the photographer has just a camera and film, and of course the subject matter, but it takes more than just technical expertise to infuse two-dimensional objects with a presence that is more than just images on paper. The buildings and streetscapes that Hans Engels depicts here speak to us of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
They are resonant with history, and with culture, and they tell us a story that is not really about architecture at all, but one of change and immutability, of despair and hope.
The subject at hand is Havana, but not the Havana necessarily of today. In this exhibition, you will not find photographs that bespeak a specific day or year or even decade; rather you will see photographs that are ageless because they are as much about time as place. And yet (I realize that this is a powerful conundrum) these photographs impart more about a place, this particular place, Havana, than many others, precisely because they are not fixed in a particular moment. They are indeed buildings that are the witness to four decades years of Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba, years of turmoil and impoverishment, years in which mere survival dominated other concerns, among them the preservation of buildings. Of the photographs in this exhibition, only one (an apartment building by Antonio Quintana) was constructed after Castro came to power, and standing alone out of the context of its street or neighborhood in brutalist isolation, it reflects the harshness that dominated both the country and the architecture of the time. It provides a counterpoint to all else in the book, buildings that stand with enormous grace and distinction, some of them lofty and some much more mundane. All, however, are imbued with a kind of nobility and with passion.
Havana has always been a city of elemental, even overpowering, beauty, a city of enormous presence on an island of magnificent geology, topography, and landscape. The first recorded descriptions of Cuba come to us from Christopher Columbus' initial trip in 1492 when, sitting offshore in the vessel Santa Maria he wrote, "I have never seen such a beautiful place." On that first voyage, Columbus spent five weeks in Cuba and returned the following year to explore it once again. What he found was a long and narrow island, the largest tropical archipelago in the West, with fertile plains, a wealth of rivers, and five different mountain ranges. The northernmost coast of the island, the land that would ultimately become Havana and its environs, had emerged from the ice ages with a steep and eroded coastline, with outcroppings of limestone and tiny fine sandy beaches.
The earliest island inhabitants lived in caves or in primitive hand-built shelters; archaeologists have found evidence of inhabitation dating back to 3500 B.C., as cave discoveries and excavations on open land have yielded pictographs, tools, pot shards, and other artifacts of early civilization. By the time Columbus arrived in Cuba, the tribes were a mix of Ciboney and Arawak (also known as Taino) Indians, and the fiercely warlike Caribs, recent arrivals from South America.
By 1511, however, the balance had begun to shift as settlers from the neighboring island of Hispaniola began the permanent European settlement of Cuba. By 1516, there were seven permanent settlements established on the island, including one that Columbus himself called El Puerto de Carenas but was then, in turn, named Batabano, then San Cristobal de la Habana, and ultimately just Habana (or Havana). The actual site of Havana was itself moved in stages to the western part of the bay, as a great awareness developed of the strategic necessities of defending both the new settlement and the island from the steady siege of pirates and others. By 1519, the city was established, and the first mass was held in the Plaza de Armas as the official christening of the town. Even then, Havana and Cuba were indeed as they were often described, "the jewels of the Spanish crown." Historians relate that Spanish soldiers regarded an assignment to St. Augustine, Florida (a place of considerable beauty and allure itself) as punishment; Havana was the prize.
Havana, then, was ruled by the water; it was its harbor that made it most significant. The Cuban-born Miami architect Andres Duany points out that Havana was the great crossroads of the Caribbean, the first stop on arrival from Europe and the last before departure; he terms it a city shaped by gold and calls it the "Rome of the Caribbean," in that all sea routes led there. Indeed it was "landfall" for the Spanish galleons carrying treasure, the safe harbor from storms at sea and from the ever-present threat of pirates seeking plunder. As the gold and pre-Columbian treasures passed through the harbor, some of it, inevitably, remained, and Havana became a very rich city. It stayed that way as the economy changed from one based on gold and plunder to one based on sugar and tobacco.
It was also a fortified city, a city of "castillos" and "fortaleza." Yet as the decades passed, Havana developed under the many influences that led to the architecture which we now think of as being particular to the Spanish New World-buildings that spring from a Moorish-Spanish-Italian-Greek-Roman influence but built within the limits of materials and skills of the craftsmen who lived in the newly developing city. Havana was planned initially behind fortified walls according to a strict colonial heirarchy and with the gridded urban layout prescribed by the Law of the Indies.
"As the city of Havana evolved at the end of the sixteenth century, so did the urban grid," wrote the Italian photojournalist Nicolas Sapieha. "A chess board, its pieces were the buidings that defined the squares, and the emerging city blocks, configured by narrow rectangular streets." The earliest buildings relied on available materials, reflecting the Mudejar traditions of Moorish Spain and using, as Duany said, "the traditional materials of the earth." Spainish influence remains today in the tilework, stone, painted ceilings, and stained glass. The ever-evolving architecture of Havana took European styles (the Baroque, Neoclassical, Beaux Arts, and the emerging modern movements, beginning with Art Nouveau and Art Deco) and transformed them, sometimes slightly and sometimes greatly, to add up to a body of work that is remarkable in its extent and intensity.
Still, the history of architecture in Havana is a history of both individual buildings and of a profound sense of urbanism. Ernest Hemingway wrote of a city "looking fine in the sun." The writer Alejo Carpentier described Havana as a city of columns, and indeed, that is the case. It is also a city of broad landscaped boulevards, the products of the grand urban plans of recent centuries; the landscapes of the last decades are often impromptu ones, wild gardens that have arrived to take over where the architecture no longer fills the land, as if nature was reclaiming its percentage.
Scholarship on the history of architecture in Cuba is relatively sparse when measured against that of other countries of comparable size and historical importance, and much of what has been written remains untranslated from the original Spanish. Even so, the ground is fertile for debate. Is the work in Havana comparatively primitive due to its mixing of styles and limitations of craftmanship, as Rachel Carley asserts? Is it too frequently viewed through the eyes of those who impose European standards of style and history on it with little comprehension of its cultural impact, as Jorge Rigau would suggest? Or is it, as Paul Goldberger points out, "one of the richest and most eclectic urban environments anywhere, overflowing with architecture that is extravagant in its ambition and spectacular in its execution."
Duany, who has made several trips to Havana to study both architecture and urban form, and who has written on the subject (in Spanish), states definitively: "What is extraordinary about Cuba and its architecture is that, of the many types to be found there, it is all first rate. By what miracle or what means this happened, it should not be discounted."
With more than 900 buildings of architectural note, Old Havana has since been a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has attracted both domestic and, with the easing of travel restrictions to Cuba, international recognition. The remainder of Havana is receiving less institutional attention, at least in terms of preserving its architecture. The architect and historian Eduardo Luis Rodriguez has become an impassioned proponent of preserving not just the architecture of each era but of the urban form of Havana. Duany, along with several other architects and designers (most of whom are of Cuban descent), has begun to study that form to create a code to allow the city to grow and rebuild without endangering what is there now, including the scale and shape of the city.
For those who have seen it, Havana remains a great revelation. Duany talks of his first reaction to buildings he recalled from his boyhood as being "almost physiological, like an electrical shock, a thrilling feeling."
That visceral response is one which in many ways can only be experienced in person. To this day, most of the world has not been so lucky. That is why Hans Engels' photographs are a powerful document and more.
In 1986, Engels was awarded the Danner scholarship for photography and as a result traveled through Europe for a year to work on a project entitled "Zeit-Rume" (a term that does not have a good counterpart in English; a literal translation would be "Time-Rooms"). The scholarship took him to Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and also Poland, after the opening of the Iron Curtain. "In Poland I saw for the first time the influence of the political system and poverty on the people and on the buildings. Living conditions there were miserable, but for my work it was very inspiring," he later said.
Engels photographed turn-of-the-century palaces-hotels, casinos and spas-long forgotten and beginning to decay. "The atmosphere of these places inspired me," he recalled. "Up to that date architecture hadn't been of much importance to me. What interested me was rather to see how a building changes through time." With camera in hand he began to investigate the many factors, physical and social, that cause buildings to transform over the years, ranging from the deleterious effect of climate on structure to the impact of inhabitation by the homeless.
From those explorations came his first two published works, a book about castles in former East Prussia and one about the topic of "Zeitrume," which was accompanied by an exhibition of the same name at the Stadtmuseum (city museum) in Munich, the Mois de la Photo in Paris, and in the Galerie Faber in Vienna.
As that work drew to a close, Engels started pondering the next step, thinking about where else in the world he might find similar conditions of poverty and neglect, of buildings left to deteriorate over time. Havana seemed a logical destination. He made two trips to Havana in 1997, during which he photographed only Art Deco buildings; a subsequent trip in 1999 led him to other twentieth-century structures. "On my first trip to Havana I was completely overpowered by the architecture on the one hand and by the people on the other. Diligence, poverty, improvisation, patience, humor, musicality, interest and a sense of business.... It seemed pure cynicism to take photographs of the aesthetic of the decay of Havana. On the contrary, I was surprised to see the vitality and variety of Havana's architecture and decided that it was worth documenting as a topic of its own."
That the photos in this exhibition are almost entirely of twentieth-century buildings is noteworthy in itself, in that oddly these are often less cared for than those centuries older. Historians in Cuba and elsewhere have been working desperately to accord equal status to important endangered structures in the city regardless of age, which might be considered a qualitative, rather than chronological, approach to conservation. At first Engels tried to compile a thorough documentation, recording buildings from each era and of each style. But he abandoned that and let his own artistic muse rule instead. "The basis of my work was the inspiration I drew from seeing the place with my own eyes on my bicycle tours of the city. Of course I tried to show the best examples of the stylistic periods. But it never was my goal to give a complete documentation of Havana's architecture; it was more important for me to show the dignity and elegance of the buildings."
Like the structures he photographs, Engels uses a timeless approach to the artistic and technical aspects of his work. He uses a Sinar camera with a 4x5 inch format, standing (or crouching, or kneeling, depending on the angle) under a darkening cloth, just as photographers did a century ago.
He does not take many photographs and then chooses among them; he takes just one, after using Polaroids to test his aesthetic, to feel and see the light. Most of these images were taken during the two separate months of February, 1997 and 1999; that was the month he found optimal for architectural photography.
In Havana, Engels rode up and down streets and through squares on a broken bicycle, "to let myself be inspired by the city." For the final photographs, with larger equipment, he traveled by cab, which meant more planning. "But I also like coincidences, and part of this documentation is spontaneous inspiration. The basic principle for my work is 'Keep your eyes and mind open'."
The photographs themselves tell a story on their own. There are, here, haunting images of buildings that seem to speak about more than just the men who made them or the materials of which they are made. These photographs are eerily profound, images of ghosts of bygone eras that have become entrapped in time. Standing alone in somber isolation or fitted into an urban complex, the buildings that Engels depicts have both dignity and pathos. This is not a didactic study, not an exhibition in which one can trace the evolution of nearly 500 years of Havana's history and judge the fairly perilous straits of its architecture. It is instead an individual look at a more subtle circumstance, which is to say architecture, and culture, of a single century.
To capture what has happened in a comparatively short time frame is to create a picture of poverty and neglect indeed. Paint is peeling off stucco; dirt and grime cover even quite recent structures. There are makeshift shutters and windows. What is lost has not been replaced; what remains is still in use or has found new function and context. And yet, Engels has found hope where others might see only hopelessness, and his photographs impart this. "Despite the decay, Havana is unique in the world because of the variety of architectural styles found there," he says. Poverty and not governmental conservation projects has preserved the buildings. That is how this documentation came into being.
