Restaurant, New Construction, Havana, 2019
Escape from modern architecture is the latest theater play in modern architecture. Feeling guilty about her own boredom, she no longer wants to look like herself.
Some time ago we discovered an architecture before architecture. With the abstraction and purity of archaic forms, stripped of their usefulness and built for representation, they test the lightness of the craft.
At first glance Circular Ruins is a massive circle placed on 6 large stones facing the sea.
Built as a restaurant from where you can look at the sea and eat Mediterranean food, it allows us, under the shade, to imagine what Jorge Luis Borges might have thought with his story “Circular Ruins”.
A small space of stony proportions where you can’t see an interior, but the sculpted exterior of an inhabited sculpture.
The domestication of this ruin is an artifice of technology, which with light removable materials, gives us the spectacle of both the primitive and the unknown.
Each disproportionately thick column encloses a useful space, such as cellar, bathrooms, kitchen and stairs. Here there are no windows or doors, all the elements that remind us of the architecture we know have been removed.
The day draws circular shadows on the tables and what look like stones
Only the tables served, the waiters walking with Spanish wine and the smell of fresh spices, brings us back to that place we could have imagined, to remind us that it is just a restaurant where we came to eat.
By Anadis Gonzalez and Fernando Martirena
