Architecture
Cuban Architect Yoandy Rizo and American Curator Rachel Weingeist began working together in 2011 after being introduced by legendary Cuban Architect Ricardo Porro. Their partnership has lead to many successful creative collaborations — Skyline Adrift: Cuban Art & Architecture at Architecture Omi; Entre Fronteras: An Architectural Intervention; and This Ain't Havana: Paladar at Queens Museum and more. In response to the renewal of formal relations between the U.S. and Cuba, they have now expanded their work together beyond museum and gallery walls, the cross-cultural New York/Havana based duo is focused on facilitating the future. Already serving a broad range of individuals and organizations in the U.S. and beyond whose goals are to participate in Cuba’s rapidly moving present architectural development, the team is happy to answer questions about collaboration.
Yoandy Rizo was born in Cuba’s countryside of Pinar del Rio in 1982. Rizo is an independent architect of both residential and commercial buildings and holds a degree in Architecture from the Polytechnic Institute José Antonio Echeverría (ISPJAE) in Havana, Cuba. Architect Magazine named Yoandy one of the “next wave of Cuban architects”. He traveled outside of Cuba for the first time in 2012 for a 6 week residency in Vermont, with an exhibit in New York entitled Skyline Adrift: Cuban Art and Architecture (2013), selected by Ricardo Porro for Omi International Arts Center, Ghent, NY. Another well received exhibit that returned him to New York was Entre Fronteras, which invited two Cuban architects, Rizo and Osmany Abel García Fuentes from Havana to Queens to work collaboratively on an experimental residency-exhibition hybrid. It resulted in architectural interventions in both the Queens Museum and Immigrant Movement International, the Museum’s long-term Corona, Queens project space conceived by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. At the Museum, García and Rizo transformed the gallery into an interior courtyard—ubiquitous in old Havana buildings—transporting the audience to their native Cuba. The ‘courtyard’ functioned as a politically neutral space that can foster a foundation for new relations, a place where islanders and non-islanders can “be Cubans”.
by Julia Cooke
Until recently, opportunities for architects in Cuba were scarce. Architects had little chance to practice outside of state jobs, and neither architecture nor industrial design appeared on the list of jobs legally privatized in 2011. No professional occupation was—since the Cuban government provides free university education for doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects, and more, such jobs remained in the public sector. For architects, this meant work in committee, for large state-sanctioned jobs like joint-venture hotels, housing projects, and state-run restaurants...
"In Cuba, we use the term alegal—neither legal nor illegal," said Yoandy Rizo, whose nascent studio practice garnered him a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2012. Last year, Rizo and Osmany Abel Garcia Fuentes designed "Entre Fronteras," an architectural intervention at the Queens Museum in New York, using wooden scaffolding to create a space both barbed and cocoon-like.