page_title: Vittorio Garatti
section_title: Restoration projects for the Escuelas Nacional de Arte
hierarchical_section_title: Vittorio Garatti / Restoration projects for the Escuelas Nacional de Arte
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of architect Vittorio Garatti's school of music, part of Cuba's National Art Schools. The School of Music is constructed as a serpentine ribbon 330 meters long, embedded in and traversing the contours of the landscape approaching the river. The scheme and its paseo arquitectonico begin where a group of curved brick planters step up from the river. This path submerges below ground as the band is joined by another layer containing group practice rooms and another exterior passage, shifted up in section from the original band. Displacements are read in the roofs as a series of stepped, or terraced, planters for flowers. This 15m wide tube, broken into two levels, is covered by undulating, layered Catalan vaults that emerge organically from the landscape, traversing the contours of the ground plane. Garatti's meandering paseo arquitectonico presents an ever-changing contrast of light and shadow, of dark subterranean and brilliant tropical environments.
context_page_description: Vittorio Garatti is an Italian architect.
context_section_description: The case of the unfinished project of the Escuelas began to emerge in 1999 with the publication, of the first edition of the book Revolution of Forms - Cuba's Forgotten Art Schools by John A. Loomis, architect and professor at the City College of New York. On 28 February 2003 the site was included on the Tentative List of World Heritage Sites by UNESCO, in the category of cultural heritage. These events gave to the abandoned architectural complex a renewed interest. 
  In 2011, the documentary Unfinished Spaces, produced and directed by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray, was released. Vittorio Garatti attended the film festival premieres in Los Angeles and Havana. The film won a Film Independent Spirit Award, the Society of Architectural Historians Film and Video Award, and was released on PBS, HBO Latin America, Al-Jazeera English, iTunes, and Netflix.
  Fundraising initiatives have since been proposed to help with the restoration and the preservation of the project. In November 2012 international press announced a project of restoration and re-use of the Havana Escuelas Nacional de Arte complex put forward by Cuban ballet superstar Carlos Acosta. According to the BBC, Acosta planned "to create a new model of [ballet] school... that would be financially self-sustaining, run as a non-profit-making charity". According to the article, however, the project was stalled because of the opposition of Vittorio Garatti, who "is protesting that he has been sidelined. He has written to Cuba's Communist leaders claiming that Acosta wants to 'appropriate' and 'privatase' his building" (S. Rainsford, "Carlos Acosta's Cuban ballet school dream", BBC News, 18 November 2012).
caption: Gallery following the weaving layout of the School of Music
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