The Italian architect Vittorio Garatti, one of the creators of the emblematic buildings designed to house the Cubanacán Art Schools, in Havana, He passed away this Thursday at the age of 96 in Milan.
“With the death of Vittorio Garatti, we lost the last of the architects of the architectural complex of the Schools of Art,” published the National Museum of Fine Arts on its Facebook profile. His countryman Roberto Gotrardi died in Havana in 2017; and the Cuban Ricardo Porro in Paris, in 2014.
The phrase corresponds to the director of the Museum, Jorge A. Fernández, who also wrote that “Vittorio’s mind and heart were permanently in Cuba, although his death occurred on Brera street, very close to the Domus and the Academy of Milan Art”.
“We say goodbye to Vittorio Garatti with the hope of seeing his finished works, this nation has a commitment to one of the men who made our architecture great,” says the note signed by Fernández.
Born in Milan in 1957, Garatti graduated from the Politecnico di Milano. That same year he left for Venezuela where he found employment in the Banco Obrero project directed by the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva and began to teach at the Central University of Venezuela. In Caracas he met the Cuban architect Ricardo Porro.
After 1959, Garatti received an invitation from Porro to project the architecture that would house the Cubanacán Art Schools, a project without equal designed for an elitist area of Havana. Porro summoned the also Italian Roberto Gottardi in this project stimulated by Fidel Castro.
Garatti was in charge of the Music and Ballet schools. “What to say about this school? A Ballet school, an animal, a crustacean, an octopus (with its enveloping, intriguing, ambiguous forms)”, he wondered, according to his text quoted by CubaDebate.
“Certainly an organism with many cavities. Cavities have always fascinated me. His mystery? The sense of attraction towards the dark hole. I have always been passionate about the seabed, discovering caves and caves, open and devastated space fascinates me, (…) a dissolution of planes: not closing, not fixing ”, she wrote.
Porro’s designs were completed in 2009, however Gottardi’s and Garatti’s remain to be completed.
“The fact that these spaces have been abandoned has not prevented them from continuing to be an inspiration for art and a place that has provided couples of young artists with an intimate refuge to dream and make love,” says the Museum of Fine Arts. in your post.
For its part, the official newspaper Granma remember that Porro, Gottardi and Garatti deserved the Vittorio de Sica Award, for architecture, in 2012 for the projection of said architectureproclaimed a National Monument.
In the context of one of Garatti’s visits to the island, the University of the Arts in Havana awarded him an Honoris Causa Doctorate, according to the report.
