Author Archives: Antonio Mendes

Despite the decline of the old city of Goa, the capital of Portuguese India, the contradictions and impasses throughout the 18th century in transferring the administrative and symbolic State apparatus to the city of Mormugao at the mouth of the river Zuari, which was the first proposed alternative capital to Old Goa, resulted in the [...]

by Vittoria Capresi

On a gentle slope west of Havana is one of the most singular buildings in the Caribbean : the National School of Music designed and built by Vittorio Garatti between 1961 and 1965. Only about half of the initial project was realized. It is a long building that extends along 330 meters and follows the [...]

Adapting works to the local physical and cultural context was a major concern for Cuban architects from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s. This preoccupation was not a new topic in the national architectural landscape, but incorporating these efforts to the modern movement’s theoretical and formal framework was. And it is in particular during the 1950s [...]

The National Art Schools of Cubanacán, Havana, feature among Cuba’s most important academic and cultural institutions. They are also outstanding on the international level, thanks to the innovative concept of organic architecture incorporating buildings, city and landscape altogether in one unique ensemble. Moreover, these schools represent the masterly culmination of the efforts developed in the [...]

The winds of war in Europe and the State’s modernization contributed to the death of the Spanish revival style in Puerto Rican architecture. Until the war years, Puerto Rican architects, in both public and private practice, designed in one historical style or another. Most of them preferred the Spanish renaissance style, but in recent years [...]

In 1945 architects Osvaldo Toro and Miguel Ferrer set up their practice in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where, up to 1984, they carried out more than 430 projects.1 Thanks to the number of projects realized and to their quality, their work is an essential reference for modern architecture in Puerto Rico. by Juan Marques Mera [...]

Until the mid nineteenth century, and for almost three hundred and fifty years, Dominican colonial architecture had been characterized by thick garden walls of brick, and limestone, and by roofs of mahogany and flat tiles, white, rough cast walls, and luminous patios. The first indication of a change in building occurred around 1865 with the [...]

In the early twentieth century, Santo Domingo was a small village. When it burst its original limits of the colonial wall and of the villages of San Carlos to the North and of Pajarito on the east bank of the Ozama River, those peripheral settlements became part of the Republic’s capital. by Omar Rancier Attached [...]

There are circumstances that site modernism. Events such as the Great International Exhibit of 1891 launched the trademark of Jamaica as a partner in celebrating industrialization with the world’s bastions of exhibition pavilions. Natural disasters have made demands on inhabitants to recover and re-structure living since 1692. by Jacquiann Lawton Attached file to this document [...]

Trinidad is the southernmost island of the Lesser Antilles. It was discovered in 1498 by Columbus but remained an underdeveloped Spanish colony until the late eighteenth century when there was large scale migration of French plantation owners and their slaves from the region. The island was subsequently claimed by the British who imported indentured laborers [...]

Martinique’s modern architecture is characterized by its widespread dissemination. Owing to its history, cyclonic destructions and seismic damage, Martinique’s heritage, prior to the nineteenth century, is limited. by Emmanuelle Gallo and Jean Doucet Attached file to this document : Martinique, Case studies in modernism