Consejos prácticos

Passing by Grassland Walk (El Paseo del Prado) from the Havanan Pier (el Malecón Habanero) up to the hill, rises such a prodigious of pure and classic elegant lines. Walkers smile, they crowd round and pose to its bronze and rock legendary feet for quite sepia memories.   
 
The National Capitol of the Cuban Republic seduces well. Because there is such a kind of visage that doesn't give up in front of time mercy but, on the contrary, as rivers of lava, grows up, burning.  
 
Alexis Espinosa maintained that strange sensation in his pupils, since that day, in 2007 year, when he passed the most audacious step in his existence. 
 
"The Principal of the Havana’s Scale Model was looking for someone interested on the construction (in a bigger scale) of some important buildings of the city, among them, the Capitol. Then, Lázaro Garcia Driggs, recognized modelist, suggested my work. So I accepted the challenge, without any doubt." 
 
Almost eight decades lapsed without the news of a mortal human attempting to make a similar work. Or was itself, maybe, this Goliath of 13 thousand 484 square meters, as the Philistine biblical legend giant, the  winner of every tentative.    
 
"The monster stood over me" 
Alexis was maintaining and repairing computers when the instinct impelled him to create plane figures (cutting paper animals, mannequins, vehicles) in Paper dolls style; a fascinating art extended around the world for more than five centuries.  
 
In order to survive inside the technological alienation, pullulating in Internet era, his hobbie was finding shortcuts toward more complex 3D designs forms. “I didn't know that existed a cuttable scale modelling or a paper scale model construction. The point is that I used to work as a ferromodelist, and that anxiety to make things with my hands was transferred to the computer world”. 
 
"I discovered the kindness of a more authentic–maybe – scale model in the way the paper was allowing me to simulate the reality with a quantity of details impossible to achieve with traditional materials. A curious thing is that I never found in Cuba before a solid knowledge about this proceeding." 
 
- A paper Capitol?!   

A mix of genius and tenacity, the new paper dome is a geometric trick of 28 faces. Around 340 cutting paper pieces shape the explanatory plane of a monumental work that now can be just hand armed

"Certainly, I didn't know where I got through. A glance to the dome made me notice that it needed an engineering help. It was such a complex process that we start debating about spheres and we finished talking about ovals and ellipses."  
 
In those endless days, he believed that he was loading forever the whole weight of solid guarders, pilasters, cornices, columns, salients...  
 
"I felt as the monster stood over me. Then I realize that auto CAD (calculation program) also allows making construction designs. So I introduced dome measures and obtained a quite closed petal (a very narrow range): so perfect figure was useless if it can not be disarmed into armable pieces." 
 
Fortunely, he was looking to the cutting paper images when he realized that lines are the common principle of all the things. Instead of spheres, he began to imagine hexagons which translated to the 3D Max computer language meant 28 faces for a shell of an enormous grace.  
 
Paper illusion 

The cuttable scale model is an economic and seemingly simple way to achieve authentic and admirable forms of the beauty.

Around two thousand pictures were necessary to visualize the building, the closest to the original as possible. "I had to appeal to file images, searching for details of that epoch, nonexistent today." 
 
From Maritza Sendra's generous hands and her partners from CITMA investments, arose so trustworthy information that, in several occasions, an advanced work was restarted from zero. "In fact, I made about four Capitols: three in black and white and one coloured."  
 
The great surprise was a Photoshop tool that stood out those textures in such a way that seemed to wrinkle the walls or to blunt the columns. “Everything is an illusion”, assures Alexis, while he uncovers the trick that seems to deceive the human ingenuousness. They look almost real: the grey colour of the granite, the shades, the lights, and the brittle glass of the windows.  
 
After six months of an endless “paper modeling", for Alexis and Sandra, his partner in life, hours are a turned page. David conquered the granite Goliath: one, thousand…, millions of times.  

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