“Thinking in Situ” Termoeléctrica Workshop

In May 2024, Friends of Havana organized a multi-day workshop on the future of the former Antonio Maceo thermoelectric site in Regla, in collaboration with CUJAE, Centro Bahía, and the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba. The workshop focused on one of Havana’s most important waterfront industrial sites and explored how it might be reimagined as a cultural, educational, and civic resource.

Over three days, architecture and planning students engaged with the site through lectures, field visits, and studio-based design work. Participants heard from Cuban specialists in energy infrastructure, urban planning, and heritage, alongside international contributors. Friends of Havana also supported the participation of Daniel Campo from Morgan State University and Aaron Vaden-Youmans of Grimshaw Architecture, who spoke about the re-use of industrial heritage in the US and the Horno 3 project, the reuse of a former steel plant in Monterrey, Mexico.

The workshop encouraged students to think seriously about industrial heritage not as a remnant of the past, but as a platform for future public life. Working at the intersection of architecture, infrastructure, and civic imagination, they developed proposals for how the former power plant site might become a new kind of public asset for Regla and Havana more broadly.

The workshop also had important institutional effects. It raised the profile of the Termoeléctrica site among municipal, city-wide, and national stakeholders, and helped deepen Centro Bahia’s relationship with EMCE, the company responsible for maintaining the site. At the same time, it strengthened FoH’s collaboration with CUJAE, whose faculty, leadership, and students engaged with the project with notable seriousness and imagination.

For Friends of Havana, the workshop demonstrated how industrial heritage can serve not only as a subject of preservation, but as a vehicle for technical education, civic engagement, and Cuban-led thinking about the future.