Agricultural Center | 2001 | Havana, Cuba  This project, designed and built with BaSiC Inititative, addresses the Cuban food crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After Cuba's subsidies were suddenly withdrawn, Cubans realized that they would have to produce their own food – or starve. Small gardens sprang up all over the city. This project was developed to organize these small scale productions into a more sustainable operation.

The Agricultural Center is a meeting place where urban food producers can sell their goods and share information on organic farming. In our big act of recycling, we renovated an abandoned chicken coop into an open-air meeting hall. We hung reclaimed ceiling panels from the existing roof structure to trap hot air, which we then ventilated through the roof. The smaller entrance pergolas and inner roofs were constructed on concrete columns that were poured into large timber bamboo formwork harvested onsite.

The building is currently used by the farmers as it was intended, as well as for gatherings in the long tradition of Cuban social clubs.

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