A two-year dialogue between the Office of City Planning in Old Havana and the School of Architecture and Design led 10 NYIT architecture students to Cuba last spring.

As part of their third-year housing studio, the students spent a week studying renovation sites along the Prado, a promenade dating back to the 18th century. Because Old Havana was declared part of UNESCO’s World Heritage in the 1980s, it has received money to preserve some of the promenade’s buildings while demolishing others. The Old Havana planning office provided the NYIT group with its most recent building codes and regulations, giving students an opportunity to collaborate and develop proposals for new buildings.

“The importance of this particular endeavor was to open the students’ eyes to the fact that hardship is the mother of invention and that the Cubans have had to innovate in all sorts of ways,” says NYIT’s Brian Brace Taylor, Ph.D., an architectural historian who led the trip with Adjunct Professor Jason Hwang.

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