Apartment Building Reynaldo Cué

Apartment Building Reynaldo Cué

Humberto Alonso

With its pilotis, its shifted concrete balconies jutting out uphazardly, its wooden louvers and infill panels, the narrow apartment building manifests Humberto Alonso’s structuralist language. [i] It deploys a virtuoso —and admittedly somewhat gratuitous— game with the concrete hyperbolic paraboloids that lean over the facades on the roof, the horizontal concrete beams in the front facades that transform into horizontal ceiling windows on the sides, the proud displays of the colored vitrales on the front façade, and the landing of the open-air stairs in the middle of the ground floor which brings up echoes of Carlo Scarpa’s combination of planes and materials.

[i] Rodríguez, The Havana Guide, p. 67, La arquitectura del movimiento moderno, p. 120.