Timothy Hyde

Monday, 17 June 2013, 6.00-7.30pm, Keynes Library (Room 114), Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

Discussant: Peter Hulme

The drafting and promulgation of a new Cuban Constitution in 1940 marked the culmination of a period of optimism in which it seemed that Cuba’s perennial and debilitating factionalism might be overcome by the establishment a durable civil society. Distinctive in this moment of Cuba’s history was the pervasiveness of constitutionalism as a cultural discourse, and authorship of the new constitution and its ideals lay not only with politicians or lawyers, but also with other professions and with intellectuals who had fostered the images of civil society.  From 1940 until the Cuban Revolution in 1959, in a decisive confluence of law and architecture, constitutionalism was elaborated through architectural principles and practices as well as legal ones as a means for planning the future of Cuba. A variety of textual, graphical, and physical artifacts—including constitutional articles, exhibitions, interviews, master plans, monuments—are the evidence of a ‘constitutional modernism’ through which the ideals of the 1940 Constitution would be embodied in the aesthetic practices of an newly reimagined republic.

Dr Timothy Hyde, Associate Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, is an architectural historian whose research focuses on intersections of architecture and politics. Dr Hyde is currently pursuing an extended study of entanglements between architecture and law, research that includes his book, Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933-1959; his essay, ‘Some Evidence of Libel, Criticism, and Publicity in the Architectural Career of Sir John Soane,’ published in Perspecta; and a new project on the aesthetic debates about ugliness in Great Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is a founding member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative and is one of the editors of the first Aggregate book, Governing by Design. He has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and his work has been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation. Dr. Hyde received his BA from Yale University, MArch from Princeton University, and PhD from Harvard University.  For more details see: http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/#/people/timothy-hyde.html

Peter Hulme is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. He has published widely on the literature, history and anthropology of the Caribbean, postcolonial studies, travel writing, native American studies and literature and the environment. His most recent book is Cuba’s Wild East: A Literary Geography of Oriente (2011).