Maqueta de La Habana

This guide to the Maqueta de La Habana opens with a question: how do you show a city its own shape when nobody living inside it can ever see it whole? It follows a team of nine, led by architect Orlando Martorell with Josefina Rebellón and sculptor Telmo García, who set out in 1988 to answer that by cutting cedar scraps salvaged from old cigar boxes and gluing them onto plywood panels for seven years before the model opened to the public in June 1995. The finished piece was assembled from thirty-nine wooden panels onto a rolling metal frame, with cardboard standing in for hills and foam for trees.