Interested in repair and based in Havana, this Cuban practice works in a careful and prudent mannerInfraestudio wasshortlisted in theAR Emerging awards 2024. Read about the full shortlist hereBuilt in 1888, a decade before the end of Spanish colonial rule in Cuba, 508 Lnea Street is a neoclassical home in the neighbourhood of Vedado, Havana. With itsgenerous garden, tiled walls and stained glass panels adorning the arched doorways, it is a prime example of the nations colonial architecture; the building holds the highest degree of heritage protection in Cuba. In 2016, conceptual artist Wilfredo Prieto sought to transform the building into the Lnea Art Center, a gallery and residency programme for contemporary artists. An extra 200m2 would need to be added, and young architectduo Anadis Gonzlez and Fernando Martirena were assigned to the project. Met with a home they felt was already fully complete, the pair decided onan alternative approach: being as absentas possible.Gonzlez and Martirena were still students at the Technological University of Havana when they received the commission. Grappling with the sites legacy and preservation status, they felt like intruders, an intuition they used to fuel their brief. They settled on three subtle interventions: awall, a staircase and a new roof. First, theyreplaced the aged wooden roof with a concrete one, using the beams from the old roof to repair the joinery, including door frames and balustrades. Thisrepurposing of existing material both improves the internal gallery spaces and speaks of the studios poetics of care. The architects also added aconcrete staircase, cast in situ, to better connect these internal spaces to the terrace on the new roof, allowing for a continuous corridor between the interior viewing rooms and the exterior courtyards. In an upcoming phase of the project, accommodation for artists will be constructed within the buildings grounds, altering, but not exhausting, the surviving courtyard: a key feature of colonial architecture they sought to preserve.Lnea Art Center is a project as much about not doing as it is about doing. It was the first commission for the pair that would eventually become Infraestudio, and the projects ethos has gradually become the signature or antisignature of the practice. The Latin infra means below, andit speaks of the studios tendency towards obscurity and subversion their architecture of repair is more about ideas than any necessary translation into form.Grappling with the sites legacy and preservation status, the architects felt like intrudersFollowing the Cuban Revolution in 1959,all private architecture firms were called toresign their authorship, and instead practise through the government. These attempts to control have continued since. As of 2021, the private practice of architecture is officially illegal in Cuba butthere remains a degree of unspoken tolerance. As long as architects do not become politically confrontational, they can exist in a vacuum of silence and their work is often paid no attention.Gonzlez and Martirena say their practice isofficially illegal, unofficially legal.Occupying this grey area, Infraestudio realised Red Garden, an intervention hidden 50 metres above Havanas waterfront, on the penthouse of a midcentury apartment. Using concrete andcoating it in red stucco, the architects created a sculptural landscape that feels intimate a protected space. The apertures cut out in the outer perimeter wall of the terrace draw the penthouse closer to the sizzling city that lives around and below it,highlighting the irony of the Cuban condition, where the only way to contribute to the building of the city is to work under aveil of secrecy.The incisions are reminiscent of the 1975artwork Conical Intersect by