Critical Analysis of Law Workshop Series
presents
Timothy Hyde
Harvard School of Architecture
“Mejores ciudades, ciudadanos mejores”
Law and Architecture in the Cuban Republic
Thursday, November 11, 2010
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium, Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
“Mejores ciudades, ciudadanos mejores”—this clever motto of a civic group organized in Cuba in 1942 employed grammatical symmetry to construe a reciprocal relationship between cities and citizens in which formal order and social order would be mutually determining. Beginning from this polemical assertion, this essay reconstructs the motives and processes of its cultural context, and by revealing the significance of the law as a cultural mode in Cuba during this period describes how the ambitions of formalism to construe a social order were actually to have been pursued through modern architecture. The catalytic event was the drafting and promulgation of a new Cuban Constitution in 1940, which became the central medium for professionals and intellectuals to advance the aim of forming a new civic consciousness for the nation out of its real and imagined history and toward its anticipated future. By examining the entanglement of architecture, planning, and law in postwar Cuba, this essay replaces what has until now been a narrow narrative of architectural formalism with a broader cultural narrative in which architects and artists, lawyers and philosophers collaborated in the conceptualization of ‘constitutionalism,’ and through which architecture attained a means for cultural and political engagement.
Timothy Hyde is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and is the Area Coordinator for the History and Philosophy of Design concentration of the Master of Design Studies Degree. He teaches courses in architectural history and theory and design studios, and is Thesis Director for the Master of Architecture degree. Hyde’s scholarship addresses issues of modern architecture and culture in the postwar period with a particular attention to the intersections and transpositions between disciplines. His current research focuses on concepts of artifice and artificiality in architectural, literary, legal, and cultural theory in the late twentieth century. He is also continuing an extended study of entanglements between architecture and law. His current book project, A Constitutional Modernism, examines the relation between architecture and constitutional jurisprudence in pre-Revolutionary Cuba. His essay “Some Evidence of Libel, Criticism, and Publicity in the Architectural Career of Sir John Soane,” published in Perspecta, pursued connections between eighteenth-century English libel law and the life and work of Sir John Soane. Hyde’s other writings range from a speculation on Reyner Banham’s theory of the gizmo, to a précis of the work of John Johansen, to a genealogy of mat-building. Hyde received his BA from Yale University, MArch from Princeton University, and PhD from Harvard University.
Co-sponsored by the Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
