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Architecture

Architecture in Havana

Havana's old centre is a dense colonial grid of arcaded streets and inner courtyards, built in coral stone the sea air keeps eating. The republic that followed added a burst of Beaux-Arts and Art Deco along the newer avenues before 1959 stopped the clock.

• Bacardi Building

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  Completed 1930

  Esteban Rodríguez Castells

  The former headquarters of the Bacardi rum company in Old Havana. Esteban Rodríguez Castells clad a steel frame in red granite and terracotta and crowned it with a stepped tower carrying the company's bat emblem. Coloured tile and brass push it fully into Art Deco, imported almost whole from the fashion of the moment. It is the clearest Art Deco object in a city otherwise built in stone.

• Hotel Nacional de Cuba

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  Completed 1930

  McKim, Mead & White

  A resort hotel on a bluff over the Malecón, twin-towered above a long arcaded front. McKim, Mead & White drew it in an eclectic mix of Spanish and Moorish detail set on a symmetrical American plan, looking out over the harbour mouth. Gardens step down from the terrace to the sea wall. It was built as the front door of pre-revolutionary Havana, and traded on that memory long after.

• El Capitolio

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  Completed 1929

  Eugenio Rayneri Piedra

  The former congress building on the edge of Old Havana, a domed capitol on the Washington model. Eugenio Rayneri Piedra raised a stone dome over a cruciform plan and lined the halls with imported marble, finished in three years at the height of the sugar boom. A diamond set in the floor beneath the dome marks the point all distances in Cuba are measured from. It was built to look like a seat of power at the moment the republic could still afford one.

• Gran Teatro de La Habana

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  Completed 1915

  Paul Belau

  A theatre on the Paseo del Prado, wrapped inside the palace of a Galician social club. Paul Belau fronted it in a busy Neo-Baroque of stone balconies and four corner turrets carrying sculpted angels. The theatre it encloses is one of the oldest still working in the hemisphere. Immigrants built it to announce that they had arrived.

• Catedral de San Cristóbal

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  Completed 1777

  Society of Jesus

  The cathedral on Plaza de la Catedral in Old Havana, cut from coral stone still full of fossils. The Jesuits began it in 1748 and left it unfinished when the crown expelled them, and it was completed to a Cuban Baroque front of two unequal bell towers. The façade curves and swells where a European Baroque church would stay flat. It is the set piece of the colonial city, framing one of the last enclosed squares in the Americas.