Ricardo Porro

Who is Ricardo Porro?

Ricardo Porro is a Cuban-born architect. He graduated in architecture from the Universidad de la Habana in 1949, following which he spent two years in post-graduate studies at the Institute of Urbanism at the Sorbonne. By the mid-1950s, his work took on distinctive Organic tendencies. In 1957, Porro published a polemical article, El sentido de la tradición, calling for a Cuban architecture that recognized the specificities of culture and history - “una arquitectura negra”. Shortly thereafter, Porro’s support for the Cuban Revolution caught up with him, and he was forced into exile when his subversive activities were discovered following the failed General Strike of 1957.

Porro fled to Venezuela in early 1958, where he taught architecture and worked in the Banco Obrero project led by famed architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva. While in Venezuela, Porro met two Italian expatriate architects: Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti. Following the victory of the Cuban Revolution, Porro returned to Cuba and in 1961 was designated by Fidel Castro as the head of design for Havana's new National Art Schools. Porro invited Gottardi and Garatti to join him in the project, for which he designed the School of Modern Dance and the School of Plastic Arts.