Instituto Tecnico Militar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the school in Cuba. For the school in Florida, see Belen Jesuit Preparatory School.

Colegio de Belén (1854-1925)

Colegio de Belén (1925-1961), Insituto Tecnico Militar (1961- Present)

Aerial view

Front entrance

Hallways

Auditorium

One of the lunch rooms

Chapel

Indoor swimming pool

Belen School nka Instituto Tecnico Militar was designed by the the Cuban architectural firm of Morales & Cia ( Leonardo Morales y Pedroso) in 1925. It is located at 45th and 66A streets in Marianao, Havana, Cuba.

The building was constructed to be used as the main building of the Colegio de Belén, which had been open since 1854 within the premises of the convent of the same name in Old Havana, but the premises became unsuitable and badly located due to the change of athmosphere in the neighborhood and the growth of the city. This project offered Morales & Cia an unlimited budget for designing a religious school, the Jesuit run Colegio de Belén.

The result is a monumental panoptical edifice with an extensive neoclasical facade perpendicular to the chapel and four great courtyards with porticoed galleries to link it with each of the nine radial pavilions. The appearance is of extreme monumentality which is supported both in the design resources and the unusual dimensions of the spaces. The structure is built from concrete-covered steel and the flooring and roof are monolithic reinforced concrete.

The chapel has three naves the central one being higher and wider, and it has a mural by Hipolito Hidalgo de Caviedes (1901-1994). It was known as "The Palace of Education." It is a Cuban National Monument.

Since 1961, after the Cuban government of Fidel Castro (a former graduate of Belen) confiscated all private and religious schools in Cuba, it has been knowned as the Insituto Tecnico Militar.

[edit] References

La Habana, Guia de Arquitectura, Maria Elena Zequeira & Eduardo Luis Rodriguez Fernandez, editors (Sevilla, Spain: A.G. Novograf, S.A., 1998) ISBN 84-8095-143-5 (Spanish)