An architectural constitution: Law, planning, and architecture in Cuba, 1937--1959

This dissertation examines the entanglement of three discourses---law, planning, and architecture---in the civic sphere of Cuba between 1937 and 1959. During this historical period, preceded and superseded by revolutions, these discourses sought to define and represent concepts of Cuba and cubanidad in both democratic and dictatorial political environments. Their entanglement arose from the actions of individuals, but also from the overlap of institutional intentions and techniques. By analyzing the events, texts, and buildings that reciprocally linked these discourses, the dissertation describes the operations through which their practices were mutually regulated. It argues that these historical and discursive confines produced a context---which the dissertation identifies as constitutionalism---that supplied the principles necessary for the construction of the civic.;The dissertation aims to supplement disciplinary accounts of architectural modernism in Cuba with this rendering of a broad discursive environment. It reveals how the trajectory of architectural modernism paralleled, on the one hand, legislative events that unfolded beginning with the drafting of a new Constitution in 1940, and on the other, the emergence of planning from initial calls for national planning in the late 1930s to the creation of a National Planning Board in 1955. The dissertation analyzes as representations several critical moments in these three trajectories: The 1940 Constitution of Cuba, which supplied the framework of the civic realm; the Junta Nacional de Planificacion, a legal entity responsible for producing a National Plan for development; Pilot Plans for the city of Havana; an unbuilt project for a new Presidential Palace; and the Monumento de Marti, a memorial to the "Apostle" of Cuban independence. The composite of these three trajectories reveals the possibility of an architecture that attempted to exceed the limits of any singular instance of architecture by representing and projecting the future fulfillment of the civic.