Edificio for Ildefonsa Someillán
Max Borges Recio
Centro Habana
1950
This is one of Max Borges’s series of spectacular apartment buildings that literally dismantled the modernist concept of flat façade into a dynamic and idiosyncratic game of blind planes, voids, and shadows. Inserted in the tight fabric of San Lázaro, the Edificio for Ildefonsa Someillán projects its deep trapezoidal balconies, two apartments per floor, which alternate diagonally on every floor and are separated by wooden persianas that seem to float as curtains in front of the façade.[i]
[i] Rodríguez, The Havana Guide, p. 191; and Gómez Díaz, De Forestier a Sert, p. 441.
