Lin Arroyo designed some of the spectacular buildings that provided the stylish backdrop for the movie stars and gangsters who frequented 1950s Havana. His Modernist landmarks, such as the Havana Hilton Hotel, the Sports Palace arena and the National Theatre, stark structures shorn of ornamentation, stood out in a city with a homogeneous architecture of Neo-Classical colonial buildings.

Arroyo also reshaped Havana in his capacity as Public Works Minister in the Government of Fulgencio Batista who had seized power in a military coup in 1952. In public office Arroyo founded the Junta de Planificación, a national planning body which oversaw a massive wave of public works across the island until halted by revolution in 1959.

Arroyo, the son of a prominent lawyer, was born in Havana in 1917 into a well-connected family. He initially eschewed a career in law and instead enrolled at the Havana School of Architecture.

Here he met his wife and collaborator Gabriela Menéndez and they set up practice as Arroyo & Menéndez in 1942.

Modernist architecture was initially embraced in a country keen to break with the colonial architecture of its recently departed Spanish overlord. But the first flush of the “International Style” of the mid-1920s was quickly superseded by the more ornamental Art Deco movement.

Arroyo was one of a number of young architects emerging in the 1940s who were determined to champion the purist, pared-down Modernist form with its clean lines and perfect proportions.

Early work, including his own house and studio, mostly consisted of apartments with their Cubist duplex blocks expressing the machine-like aesthetic of the International Style.

As the practice emerged, Arroyo became an active member of Le Corbusier’s Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and his style evolved to reflect Le Corbusier’s ideas more and more. The apartment of Enrique Menendez (1953) was based on Le Corbusier’s housing block Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles (1952). A year later Arroyo completed Cuba’s first Modernist church, San Pablo, with its landmark bell tower clad in a latticework of concrete brise soleil which was so evocative of Le Corbusier.

As the 1950s progressed, Arroyo became less derivative and developed his own vocabulary of shapes, materials and details that expressed looser, more sinuous forms, facilitated by the growing use of structural concrete in the region at that time, notably in Brazil. The breaking of the strict Modernist rules with such curves came to be known as “mambo Modernism”.

Armed with a more distinctive and varied design palette, Arroyo produced his best work and, according to the Cuban architectural historian Eduardo Luis Rodríguez, “the most remarkable and visible public buildings in Havana”.

These included the National Theatre of Cuba (1954-60), a Cubist concrete composition of two theatres back to back with fully glazed entrance façades to humanise the building amid its large expanse of concrete.

The Sports Palace or “Coliseo” (1955-57) was a circular, layered arena for 15,000 spectators — the top layer a 100m diameter cupola which required no supporting beams, thus creating a spectacular open space below.