Cuba's National School of Ballet: Redefining a Structural Icon

Abstract

The domed buildings and undulating walkways at Cuba’s National Art Schools have attracted the attention of the international scholarly community for the past two decades. For this undergraduate thesis, the Ballet School was chosen for individual study because there was an established knowledge base from a cultural and architectural perspective, yet there was not an equivalent understanding from an engineering and construction perceptive. Design and construction of the Ballet School represent an important moment in Cuban and international engineering history, as its structural system is one of the few modern examples of an ancient construction technique (thin-tile vaulting) that has eluded modern computational analysis. Field work conducted in November 2016, however, resulted in discovery of a reinforced-concrete, grid-shell system underneath the adobe tile cladding. Analysis methods were correspondingly adjusted to allow for the presence of both thin-tile vaulting and reinforced concrete. Even with field data in hand, there were persisting uncertainties so a range of historical, graphical, and computational analyses were conducted in parallel. This synthesis of multidisciplinary approaches, including basic membrane theory equations, thrust line analysis, and finite element method (FEM), was used to assess the structure and determine the validity of the original engineering decisions such as where to use reinforced concrete and where to use adobe tile. Today, the Ballet School sits abandoned, despite efforts by many Cubans and non-Cubans to preserve the structure. With the original documents in jeopardy of being lost forever, it is a critical time to document the structure not only from a historical perspective, but also from engineering and architectural perspectives. Therefore, in addition to the structural analysis, archival work was started which included digitizing historical construction photos and piecing together a construction timeline. The Art Schools in Cuba have complex and interwoven cultural, social, political, architectural, and engineering backstories, mandating interdisciplinary approaches of study if preservation of these exquisite structures is to be successful.