Architecture Film Series: Unfinished Spaces

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In the earliest years of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had an idea for the National Art Schools, a beautiful, ambitious architecture and education project that involved five separate schools with free tuition for the fledgling country's creative minds. Cuban architects Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi, and Vittorio Garatti were tapped to design something unique. But problems loomed—the eventual disintegration from utopian society to a dictatorship, the Cuban Missile Crisis, a general tide turning against Socialism in other parts of the world. The schools fell into ruin and disrepair, but were rediscovered many years later for their visionary architecture. The documentary Unfinished Spaces, which the Dallas Center for Architecture will screen, features interviews with the three original architects, who talk about the spirit of the revolution and how their pet project rose and fell.