Yale School of Architecture Dean's Council

YALE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE DEAN’S COUNCIL Buenos Aires, Argentina March 9–14, 2014 INTRODUCTION Buenos Aires, the heritage of a universal periphery “I suspect that the birth of Buenos Aires is just a story; I deem her to be as eternal as water and air”. Jorge Luis Borges The Mythical Foundation of Buenos Aires, 1929 Borges’s allusion to the eternal nature of Buenos Aires and his doubts about the origin of the city, are a fne refection of its timeless identity. Buenos Aires is surrounded by a minimalist geography of water and land which strengthens the role of architecture as the only multi-form and exuberant physical variable, thus transforming it into a natural rather than cultural heritage. The world of Buenos Aires’ buildings is made up of leftovers of historical layers, either juxtaposed or superimposed. The concentrated, four hundred-year-old physical universe of Buenos Aires is like an architectural library of Babel or a labyrinth of styles representative of the Western World. It is forever a collage of historical and geographic variables, decanted from various cultural world centers and innumerable peripheries. 2 What remains today of the original “Big Village” are parts of the strict foundational grid and the noblest Andalusian-infuenced pieces that chronologically followed a mud and straw town. The last corner of the Spanish Empire—an impossible port called Trinidad and a wayward city called Buenos Aires—arose from an ambiguous tradition that received the contribution of diverse civilian and religious communities. When the baroque movement took over the continent and fourished into a Hispanic-indigenous fusion of cultures, the city was able to abstain from excesses. Drenched in whitewash, it remained loyal to its European repertoire which, by this time, it was capable of summarizing and transforming into a language of its own. In addition, she took full advantage of the surrounding neutral geography to make sure she stood out. The city’s modest physiognomy rose up imposingly on the banks of the river, which she still respected as her one and only privileged partner. When the city became the capital of the Vice Royalty, she found her simplicity enhanced by classicism which would rule over her physiognomy for a number of decades. The urban image required by the Independence era was a geo- metric austerity that reafrmed the city’s neoclassical character. Whether royal or popular, construction vibrated within the rational rythm of the original checkerboard grid. In time, the city acquired a new autochtho- nous and monochromatic harmony, a certain calm, detached from the upheavals and turbulent disputes between Unitarios and Federales, two political parties of the time. The new strains of European architectural blood, be they French, Italian or German, all mixed and merged in the omnipresent classicism. Towards the middle of the 19th century—as would happen again one century later—the nobility and greatness that had been achieved thanks to a sublime monotony would soon succumb under a hail of heterogeneous styles. That frst short-lived splendor was captured by foreigners like William Mac Cann who said in his 1853 book “Travels on Horseback Throughout the Argentine Provinces”, “…Many signs of deca- dence can already be seen, but a foreigner can still get a very good idea of this South American capital’s past greatness which, as Lord Byron of Venice was fond of saying ‘dies daily’…” 3 The brief, mid-19th century hiatus of neoclassical pomp was a ftting, coherent and harmonious end to two centuries of architectural Latin. Once this period was over, the second stage of the city’s shaping began and so did the road to its transformation into the “Capital of an Imaginary Empire”. It started with a stylistic alliance of German and Italian origin which echoed the unifying movements taking place in those two coun- tries and whose presence dominated the scene during the third quarter of the 19th century. When the Buenos Aires’ conficts with the rest of the country had been overcome and the golden Pampas hinterland had been conquered, the city crowned itself with the unabashed ambition of pos- sessing the Continental scepter. To do so, the local passion for the architectural culture of France allied itself with the Italian art of building and consolidated the city’s image as the head of “The Granary of the World”. To strengthen this preeminence the British know-how was skillfully han- dled and permitted to attach the capital to the continent and to connect it with the rest of the world. Buenos Aires soon became a privileged stage for the architectural experiments that well represent a period of in the history of the Western World that seemed to be an intricate net- work of overlapping endings and beginnings, a time in which there arose mechanisms, procedures and problems that anticipated future situations. Within a context where increasing globalization, transferences, mobility and exchanges of people, products and services reach unparalleled levels there are situations and phenomena that are still not understood in their true dimensions. The architectural culture of Buenos Aires refects all these processes as no other city, but it’s defnition is difcult. In a context of multifaceted eclecticism this culture lacks of ideological, stylistic and technological homogeneity. Besides, its esthetic values are underesti- mated for not complying with vanguardist standards. Its historical values are also dismissed for not showing, at least in appearance, the identity 4 of the place or of the period. Despite of these handicaps, this architectural culture was one of the most remarkable refections of Argentina’s formidable growth process at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. It was also a period that saw Buenos Aires undergo the transformation from a “Big Village” into a “Great European City” due mainly to the unusual growth and development of its construction and urbanization. This phenomenon of becoming a newborn metropolis was almost unique for the times and was nourished by the variety of diferent architectures being designed and constructed, constituting a truly inter- national showcase of building styles and types. The complexity of the prevailing eclecticism at that moment was intensifed on this side of the Atlantic, not only by the use of countless historic variables, even those of the contemporary European repertoire, but also by the multiple geographical origins of the alternatives. This variety of styles was once again increased by adaptations, reinterpretations and combinations, all of which resulted in an invigorated eclecticism. Within this context, it becomes extremely difcult to identify or pinpoint the sources of inspiration of each work. The monuments and sites of this period oblige historians to turn into entomologists or philologists. To identify each architectural specimen, it is fundamental to analyze its lineage and unveil its genre or species. And so, the appearance of “architectural oddities” is not strange and their historic or esthetic appreciation must be compounded by their worth as cultural curiosities. In some excep- tional cases monuments turn out to be “missing links” in the universal chain of typologies, as was the case of the no longer existent Bunge and Born silo in the Puerto Madero area, probably the world’s most valuable 5 grain elevator. In other cases, the last and sophisticated specimens of an extinguished evolution appear. This is the case of the Colon Theatre, the grand fnale of a dynasty, which was inaugurated shortly before the First World War. Just as Borges said about his own “Universal History of Infamy”, the belle époque monuments of Buenos Aires are also “…the irresponsible entertainment of a timid individual that did not dare to write stories and, without any esthetic justifcation, amused himself by adulterating and dis- torting the stories of others…” Besides, this recreational architecture was able to come up with its own language, written in a constructively hybrid but scintillating tongue, a kind of slang derived from an Italian-French fusion: the imitation Parisian Stone stucco. This was an additional element that helped to materialize a fctitious architectural culture, ahead of its time in its “virtualness”. This architectural culture was also made up of amoral esthetics and historical anarchy in which freedom of choice reached its high point and heterodoxy was the by-word. Behind an apparent and irra- tional iconography, a rational semiology appears and forms part of the city’s deeper identity and of its intrinsic diferentiation from others. All this architectural heritage highlights yet another special signifcance: it was absolutely demonstrative of a postmodernist and globalized attitude that was ahead of its time. In his 1910 work, “South American Travel Notes”, an observant Georges Clemenceau pointed out the paradox: “…I think the true Argentine is convinced that a magical virtue of Juvencio, rising from the deepest recesses of its soil, has completely rejuvenated and rebuilt him into a new man, a man that is no one’s descendent but the innate forefather of the formidable generations to come..”. He also warns of the 6 dangers of the contradiction, “…the impertinence of Buenos Aires is to introduce us, under the guise of being European, to a reckless Argentine character… Not content with being Argentines from head to toe, if these wicked people were left to their own, they would make us Argentines in the blinking of an eye…” As the frst post war period began, Buenos Aires had already conquered its new tradition. As happened in the feld of music where she was unfail- ingly identifed with tango, fusion ruled over the identity of her building culture and would continue to recreate it for several decades to come. Within the context of a short 20th century, its pluralist architectural moder- nity appeared as four architectural movements: blue, white, red and gray.

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