page_title: Edificio del Seguro Médico, Havana
section_title: Structure
hierarchical_section_title: Edificio del Seguro Médico, Havana / Structure
caption_attribution_description: English: Edificio del Seguro Médico, Havana_NE Elevation
context_page_description: The Edificio del Seguro Médico is a commercial building in El Vedado, Havana. Built between 1955 and 1958, it was designed as a mixed use building for apartments and offices for the headquarters of the National Medical Insurance Company. It is considered to be one of the best commercial buildings in Havana of the 1950s, and among the best modernist buildings in the city.
  In regards to Edificio del Seguro Médico an architect from the Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, Carlos Alberto Odio Soto made the following observation:
  "Within the modern heritage architecture of the 50s, there is the Medical Insurance Building, work designed by the architect Antonio Quintana in 1955. This work was praised even before its inauguration by the prestigious Professor Pedro Martínez Inclán on the occasion of the delivery of the First Prize to the Project where he proposed that Quintana, when he managed to carry out his project, could blazon of having endowed Havana, according to the famous sentence of Paul Valery, "of a building that speaks."
context_section_description: The residential block is supported by four bearing walls 9.40 meters apart, expressed on the office block by vertical glass mullions (4 red lines). These bearing walls allow for curtain wall construction: a non-loadbearing facade.
  The structural module of 9.40 meters by 10.30 meters. The 9.40-meter dimension between walls is further subdivided into three modules of 3.13 meters ( 10'-3"), and this is the architectural dimension seen previously of all the bedrooms and living rooms. There are eleven 3.15 meter subdivisions in total which make up the one-bedroom (6.30 meters) and two bedrooms (9.40 meters) apartments. The outermost 3.13 meters of slab at either end and on each floor, shown hatched on the structural plan diagram, is cantilevered and that is how Quintana achieves the thin walls at the ends of the apartment block (on the NE elevation), these walls only carry their own weight similar to the South and North walls of the United Nations Secretariat Building. They are the same thickness as the floor slabs. All outboard balconies are 5.34 meters long, all non-service rooms have access to balconies. The two basic floor plans of apartments alternate between the eighth floor and the twenty-third floor. The apartments on the seventh floor (the 1,449 sq m roof of the office block) had private gardens; the end wall of the residential block is missing and the residential block appears to float. (N.E. elevation). Unfortunately, the tenants of this apartment have added rooms so this subtle modernist detail has been lost. These three units and their private gardens, overlooking Calle 23, were confiscated early in 1960 and the roof was turned into a children's playground; the playground was eventually closed.
caption: NE Elevation with the expression of the 9.40 meter residential module-support walls shown in red
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