Timothy Hyde (associate professor of architecture) announces his new book, Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933-1959, which examines the complex entanglements between architecture, planning, and law in the Cuban Republic.
Constitutional Modernism recounts how architects joined with other professionals and intellectuals in efforts to establish a stable civil society, from the promulgation of a new Cuban Constitution in 1940 up until the Cuban Revolution. It reveals how constitutionalism produced a decisive confluence of law and architecture, a means for planning the future of Cuba. By arguing that constitutionalism was elaborated through architectural principles and practices as well as legal ones—and by offering an unprecedented examination of constitutional articles, exhibitions, interviews, master plans, monuments, and other primary materials as acts of design—Constitutional Modernism provides a new view of architectural modernism as a political and social instrument.
“This is a major book on Cuba. It is the best history of modern Havana ever written, unlikely to be surpassed. Timothy Hyde is a thorough, scrupulous historian with a sophisticated grasp of architectural history and theory, as well as of the political and artistic history of Cuba.”
–Roberto González Echevarría, Yale University
Hyde will give a lecture on Constitutional Modernism at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies on February 27th.
The Frances Loeb Library at the GSD is presenting an exhibit of source materials for Constitutional Modernism from the collections of the Harvard Libraries.