The Hotel Rosita De Hornedo, located in the Puntilla area of Miramar, was one of the first major buildings to be built by a private developer in the 1950s in Havana.
Alfredo Hornedo
Alfredo Hornedo y Suárez entered politics and was elected by the Liberal Party, first in 1914, as Councilman of the City of Havana, until he became a Senator; elected 1938 and reelected in 1944 and 1948. He was also delegated to the Constitutional Assembly of 1940 and presided over the Liberal Party between 1939 and 1947. In 1957, the Rosita de Hornedo, owned by the senator who had been one of the signatories of the 1940 Constitution of Cuba, who also owned the newspaper El País on Calle Reina, the Excélsior newspaper, and the Mercado Único of La Habana, named the building after his second wife, Rosita Almanza; he built other properties in the area including the larger Riomar Building, also by the architect Cristóbal Martínez Márquez and located in the adjoining lot. Alfredo Hornedo y Suárez was the owner of the Blanquita theater which , now the Karl Marx Theatre, and the Sports Casino, which is today the social circle Cristino Naranjo.
Architecture
The trapezoidal site accommodates the building on its south side, and parallel to 1st street; there are several outdoor swimming pools on the north side of the site. Like the FOCSA Building in the Vedado, the Rosita De Hornedo has a semi-covered Porte-cochère with a lightly sloping ramp that brings automobiles to the front entrance of the building. There are a total 13 floors above the ground floor level. The ground floor is composed of the primary building entrance which is close to the elevator core, and commercial services and attendant functions; above the ground floor, there are 12 floors of residential units containing 172 apartments including the top two floors which have two circular pent-house apartments that overhang the east side of the building giving it a distinctive European, modernist and expressionist character. The Senador Alfredo Hornedo y Sánchez, owner of the Hornedo, lived in the estate Blanca de Ceiba and in the mansion of Carlos III No. 120, the current House of Culture of Centro Habana, then moved to the penthouse of his Hotel Rosita de Hornedo, he lived in one of the penthouses. The apartments on the lower 10 floors have a living room, kitchenette, and a balcony on the north side units, and strip windows overlooking Miramar's first avenue. The elevations are composed of a modernist curtain wall, its north side facing the sea contains a balcony between apartments that are shared by the units; there are six lines of balconies, the two lines furthest to the east serve single apartments. As opposed to the south elevation which contains strip windows spanning the entire length of the facade, the north elevation, as does the east elevation, has rectangular windows.
In general, high rise apartment buildings have technical and economic advantages and especially in areas of high population density such as Havana. In contrast with low-rise and single-family houses, apartment blocks can accommodate more inhabitants per unit of area of land and decrease the cost of municipal infrastructure. The typical residential tower block with its concrete construction is a familiar feature of Modernist architecture. Influential examples include Le Corbusier's "housing unit" his Unité d'Habitation, repeated in various European cities starting with his Cité radieuse in Marseille, constructed of béton brut, rough-cast concrete, as steel for framework was unavailable in post-war France. Residential tower blocks became standard in housing urban populations displaced by slum clearances and "urban renewal". High-rise projects after World War II typically rejected the classical designs of the early skyscrapers, instead embracing the uniform international style; many older skyscrapers were redesigned to suit contemporary tastes or even got demolished - such as New York's Singer Building, once the world's tallest skyscraper. However, with the movements of Postmodernism, New Urbanism, and New Classical Architecture, that established since the 1980s, a more classical approach came back to global skyscraper design, that is popular today.
3 out 5 points of architecture
The Rosita De Hornedo building has different elevation treatments responding to the exposure of the sun. The north elevation has a view of the sea that gets little if any direct sun-light, it is here where most of the balconies in the building are located. The south elevation is part of, along with the detached structure which allows for a curtain wall construction, 3 out of the 5 points in Le Corbusier's Five Points of Architecture: 1) The free designing of the ground plan—the absence of supporting walls—means the building is unrestrained in its internal use. 2) The free design of the façade—separating the exterior of the building from its structural function—sets the façade free from structural constraints. 3) And the horizontal window, which cuts the façade along its entire length, lights rooms equally.
Massing
The architectural massing of the Rosita De Hornedo building is mainly composed of two perpendicular eleven floors, double-loaded, reinforced concrete slab sections of different heights set perpendicular to each other and forms, because of the unequal distribution of the rooms, a slightly elongated "T" on plan. The building slab parallel to 1st street has two different curtain wall facade treatments that respond to the orientation of the sun. The elevator core, located near the ground floor entrance, is the tallest point in the building, and along with the fire stairs on the west end, are expressed on the exterior massing of the building. The top two floors contain the circular and overhanging penthouses which are a radically different architectural treatment from the rest of the building and giving rise to the comparison of the Rosita De Hornedo to Erich Mendelsohn's De La Warr Pavilion, in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, England.
Buildings have long been constructed with the exterior walls of the building supporting the load of the entire structure. The development and widespread use of structural steel and later reinforced concrete allowed relatively small columns to support large loads; hence, exterior walls of buildings were no longer required for structural support. The exterior walls could be non-load bearing and thus much lighter and more open than the masonry load-bearing walls of the past. This gave way to increased use of glass as an exterior façade, and the modern-day curtain wall was born. Early prototype versions of curtain walls may have existed in buildings of timber construction before the 19th century, should columns have been used to support the building rather than the walls themselves, particularly when large panels of glass infill were involved. When iron began to be used extensively in buildings in late 18th-century Britain such as at Ditherington Flax Mill, and later when buildings of wrought iron and glass such as The Crystal Palace were built, the building blocks of structural understanding were laid for the development of curtain walls. Oriel Chambers and 16 Cook Street, both built in Liverpool, England, by local architect and civil engineerPeter Ellis, are characterised by their extensive use of glass in their facades. Towards the courtyards they even boasted metal-framed glass curtain walls, which makes them two of the world's first buildings to include this architectural feature. The extensive glass walls allowed light to penetrate further into the building, utilizing more floor space and reducing lighting costs. Oriel Chambers comprises set over five floors without an elevator, which had only recently been invented and was not yet widespread. An early example of an all-steel curtain wall used in the classical style is the Kaufhaus Tietz department store on Leipziger Straße, Berlin, built in 1901. Some of the first curtain walls were made with steel mullions, and the polished plate glass was attached to the mullions with asbestos- or fiberglass-modified glazing compound. Eventually silicone sealants or glazing tape were substituted for the glazing compound. Some designs included an outer cap to hold the glass in place and to protect the integrity of the seals. The first curtain wall installed in New York City, in the United Nations Secretariat Building, was this type of construction. Earlier modernist examples are the Bauhaus in Dessau and the Hallidie Building in San Francisco.
Exterior walls
The exterior walls of the Rosita De Hornedo are made up of a curtain wall system; the function of the exterior wall is only to keep the weather out and the occupants in; since the curtain wall is non-structural, they are made out of lightweight materials, thereby reducing construction costs. The curtain wall façade does not carry any structural load from the building other than its own dead load weight. The wall transfers lateral wind loads that are incident upon it to the main structure of the building through connections at floors or columns of the building. A curtain wall is designed to resist air and water infiltration, absorb sway induced by wind and seismic forces acting on the building, withstand wind loads, and support its own dead load weight forces. Curtain wall systems are typically designed with light framing members, although the first curtain walls were made with steel frames. The aluminum frame is typically infilled with glass, which provides an architecturally pleasing building, as well as benefits such as daylighting. However, the effects of light on visual comfort as well as solar heat gain in a building are more difficult to control when using large amounts of glass infill. Infill the Rosita De Hornedo include: precast, lightweight concrete veneer panels, window louvers, and operable strip windows on the south side of the building.
Expressionist work
The formal design of the Rosita De Hornedo, with its south facing strip windows and circular, overhanging penthouses, was in part inspired by the expressionist work of architect Erich Mendelsohn who was a German architect known for his expressionist architecture in the 1920s, as well as for developing a dynamic functionalism in his projects for department stores and cinemas. Mendelsohn is a pioneer of the Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architecture; specifically, the Hornedo recalls his 1921 Mossehaus design. and his Schocken Department Store, Stuttgart, 1928, especially the penthouses facing towards the east recall Erich Mendelsohn's, and Serge Chermayeff’s the De La Warr Pavilion: "one of the most talked-about buildings in Britain when it was opened in December 1935." However, Spike Milligan commenting on the 2nd World War said of the building: "...De La Warr Pavilion, a fine modern building with absolutely no architectural merit at all. It was opened just in time to be bombed. The plane that dropped it was said to have been chartered by the Royal Institute of British Architects with Hugh Casson at the controls and John Betjeman at the bombsight..."
Attack of the Rosita De Hornedo
In August 1962, a group part of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil militants, travelled to Cuba from Miami in a small boat and attacked the Rosita de Hornedo building, known after the revolution as the Hotel Sierra Maestra, they fired a canon, terrorizing the guests of the Hotel, then fled back to the United States. Among the DRE militants was José Basulto. Since the Cuban Revolution, Basulto participated in various activities intended to subvert or overthrow the Cuban government. After the revolution, he was trained by the CIA in intelligence, communications, explosives, sabotage and subversion in Panama, Guatemala, and the United States. He was later placed back into Cuba, posing as a physics student at the University of Santiago to help prepare the ground for the Bay of Pigs Invasion. In 1961, under CIA sponsorship, Basulto infiltrated Cuba for a commando operation intended to sabotage an alleged missile site, a mission which was ultimately aborted. In August 1962 he was involved in an expedition of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil which took a boat to Cuba and fired a 20 mm cannon at the Rosita De Hornedo hotel, though nobody was killed in the incident.
