Registros. Revista de Investigación Histórica
REGISTROS es una revista semestral de investigación arbitrada y de acceso abierto, especializada en la indagación histórica y teoría de las disciplinas del proyecto. Publica trabajos científicos inéditos y originales, relevantes para alguna de sus áreas de conocimiento: Historia, Teoría y Crítica de la Arquitectura, del Diseño Industrial, del Urbanismo y del Planeamiento Urbano-Regional. Historia urbana, y territorial.
Mar del Plata: Facultad de Arquitectura Urbanismo y Diseño Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata
Verticalization in the Americas. Second half of the 20th Century
During the second half of the 20th century, verticalization processes were characterized by the expansion of the tower typology and corporate business centers, as well as the production of plans and projects that sought –with varying degrees of success– to organize urban centers through the zoning of verticality. From the singularity of the architectural object to typological repetition; from high-tech to prefabrication, the use of new technologies, and formal inquiry, the rise of height as a response to urban issues and housing demand opened new debates on verticalization in American cities. The articles in this dossier address these dimensions through specific case studies –individual buildings or urban scalesv located in Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, and Mexico.
Copyright (c) 2026 Registros. Revista de Investigación Histórica https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Italian Participation in the Competition for the Peugeot Skyscraper in Buenos Aires (1961-62)
The competition for the Peugeot skyscraper marked a moment of international reflection on the subject of high-rise constructions, not only for the project to build the tallest skyscraper in South America, but also for the search for expressiveness capable of turning it into a recognizable symbol in the urban landscape. Aside from the winning proposals and the few that were published by the specialized press, many projects remain virtually unknown, starting with those of Italian engineers and architects. Based on research in public and private archives, the article presents the proposals developed by seven Italian teams –led respectively by Maurizio Sacripanti, Vico Magistretti, Enrico Castiglioni, Sergio Conti, Riccardo Morandi, Elio Piroddi, and Vittorio Mazzucconi– and hypothesizes Pier Luigi Nervi's involvement in the structural verification of the winning project. Despite the diversity of formal results, the Italian projects respond to the challenge of giving the skyscraper a "distinctive character" by pursuing a close integration between structure and form. And, in some cases, they anticipate the tree-like structure adopted by Mario Bigongiari for the Pirelli tower, which was built in a nearby area in the 1970s.
Antonio Bonet’s "Stepped Verticalization" in Mar del Plata
In 1957, Antonio Bonet designed the "Terraza Palace" residential building in Mar del Plata on the Bulevar Marítimo in Playa Grande. The project was resolved through a 7 floors terraced volumetry that minimized the shadow cone over the adjacent beach resort, generating "hanging gardens over the sea" on each level. This article aims to address this architectural object by reconstructing the variables that converged on it. To do so, we seek to revive the debates that arose around terraced architecture, based on the hygienic approaches of modern architecture since the spread of Richard Döcker's terrassen typ, adopted by figures such as Loos, Poelzig, and Breuer in the 1920s and 1930s. Furthermore, the hypothesis we would like to consider is that the building's volumetry was the result of the intersection between the "stepped block" typology, which Bonet was beginning to experiment with, and the regulations in force at that time in the location. We believe that this project, in addition to its value as a unique architectural piece and typological exploration, encapsulates a moment of tension between the contemporary spirit of modern architecture and the regulations in the process of transformation of the Buenos Aires coast.
The Media Construction of Verticality. High-Rise Buildings in Torreón in the Mid-Twentieth Century
This article examines how the local press and architectural practice shaped the notion of verticality in Torreón during the first half of the twentieth century, addressing the problem of how a modern city in northern Mexico incorporated high-rise architecture into its urban imagination and repertoire. The objective is to reconstruct the media discourses and the cultural and technical, conditions that enabled the emergence of vertical buildings, as well as to analyze their meanings within the region’s modernizing project, primarily through architectural description. The study is grounded in a theoretical approach that integrates urban history, architectural culture, technological imaginaries, and architectural analysis. Methodologically, it combines systematic review of historical newspapers, consultation of archival documents, formal analysis of projects and buildings, and a hermeneutic reading of the skyscraper as concept. The results show that the local press produced an early skyscraper culture that preceded the construction of vertical buildings, shaping expectations of social acceptance and rejection. The study also identifies that buildings such as the Vallina, Río Nazas, Elvira, Seguros Monterrey, and Algodonero embodied a form of local modernity whose current fragility reflects processes of deterioration, substitution, and loss of meaning.
Verticalization Processes in Latin America in the first half of the 20th Century
Since the late 19th century, the skyscrapers and the vertical growth of cities have captivated the attention and imagination of architects, urban planners, engineers, artists, and the public. Far from being exhausted, the debate on this topic invites us to rethink the development of these processes and the exchanges that take place between different urban realities. Indeed, it is from changes and transformations that new and thought-provoking questions emerge, capable of enriching our understanding of the history of urban verticalization in the region, and to which this issue hopes to contribute. The studies compiled here address various issues and processes related to the history and development of high-rise construction in Latin America in the first half of the 20th century, such as case studies in key metropolises such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Rosario, offering a regional perspective.
Copyright (c) 2025 Registros. Revista de Investigación Histórica https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article discusses the relationship that Justo Solsona (1931) established with the Kavanagh skyscraper (Buenos Aires, 1934-36) as a reference for his teaching practice in architecture and his professional projects. A relationship that, born in the context of La Escuelita (1976-1983), operated decisively, according to my hypothesis, in the turn in his way of conceiving the project process based until then on what Liernur calls "a kind of permanent singularity" to adopt a position favorable to reflecting on what has been built. But, at the same time, the Kavanagh skyscraper operated for Solsona temporarily as a neo-avant-garde objet trouvé, but at the same time - and due to the historical-critical thickness that the building endowed - this attraction could be argued disciplinarily. The long-standing link with this Buenos Aires icon recognizes three stages: the first, very brief, focuses on 1977 when the Kavanagh was chosen to constitute the object of the formal redesign of the Architecture Course at La Escuelita; the second corresponds to his return to the UBA in 1984 and where the Kavanagh became the iconic and methodological reference for projects by students in the third year of his workshop who had a defined program and a precise terrain; while the third stage, temporarily overlapping the second, began in 1989 when Solsona adopted the morphology of the Kavanagh as part of his own reflexive and projectual searches that continued until the end of the last century.
Designing Skyscrapers in America: Immigrant Architect Giancarlo Palanti's Experiments
This paper analyzes the projects carried out by the immigrant architect Giancarlo Palanti in Italy and Brazil, focusing particularly on his proposals for the new headquarters of the Circolo Italiano de São Paulo in 1951 and the redesign of the Conde de Prates building in the city center in 1952. It examines how Palanti conceived skyscrapers and contributed to shaping the image of a modern metropolis in the American Continent, verifying compositional, technical, and material continuities and changes. Born and educated in Milan, Palanti was actively engaged in the search for a modern Italian architectural identity. However, it was in Brazil –where he immigrated in 1946– that he encountered several opportunities to address the challenges of skyscraper design in a country simultaneously forging its own path toward a modern Brazilian architecture, in which he also participated, amidst the diffusion of North American culture for this typology. By cross-referencing primary and secondary sources from collections in Italy and Brazil, the study maps the particularities of these projects. The hypothesis advanced here is that, within this experimental context, Palanti’s projects exemplify the blending of cultures in the sense of hybridization.
This article examines the process of verticalization in the city of João Pessoa between the 1950s and 1970s, investigating the tensions between modernity and tradition, progress and local identity, through the discourses mobilized in the construction of distinct imaginaries. On the one hand, modernity was championed and materialized in the figure of the skyscraper; on the other, the defense of ways of life and spatial occupation grounded in the notion of a Northeastern mode of dwelling, regarded as a more authentic and regionally embedded cultural expression. By delineating a key period of urban expansion in the capital of Paraíba, these decades witnessed verticalization and the single-family house embodying two divergent conceptions of urban growth, two models of territorial occupation—each pointing to distinct dwelling practices, either consonant with or opposed to the suggestions of local climate and culture. Reflecting the broader tensions that informed debates on verticalization in Brazil since the 1920s, this episode in the urban history of João Pessoa is distinguished by the subjection of verticalization and its imaginaries to cultural determinants that expanded the critical discourse surrounding skyscrapers and their local relevance, considered beyond economic, hygienic, or moral dimensions.
From Chalets to Concrete Giants: Urban Transformation in Mar del Plata
The book explores the history of construction in Mar del Plata, focusing on the widespread introduction of reinforced concrete in the city and the emergence of new high-rise buildings. Through the network of people, companies, and other involved actors, it examines the processes that shaped the work culture and the impact of the Horizontal Property Law on the development of the real estate market. The work invites readers to question and reflect on the spaces we inhabit in a city where progress was the guiding principle and where, symbolically, the transition was made from sand to concrete.
Perspectives on Verticality in the Seventies. Intellectual Networks, Themes and Representations
This article aims to contribute to the reconstruction of the debate on verticality during the 1970s. In line with this objective, the hypothesis argues that, during this period, discussions of international scope took place that profoundly transformed the “ways of seeing” this phenomenon. In particular, a shift can be observed in the assessments of high-rise constructions, which ceased to be understood exclusively as symbols of progress and modernity and instead became the object of a problematizing and largely disenchanted reading, associated with the negative effects of verticalization in a broad sense that goes beyond the strictly architectural field to encompass social, economic, and environmental dimensions. To corroborate this, the article analyzes a fragment of that debate through specific exchanges among four issues of architecture magazines from different countries –L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Summa, Casabella and Oppositions– published between 1975 and 1977.
The Verticalization of Downtown Rio de Janeiro during the Vargas Era (1930–1945)
This article examines the reconstruction of downtown Rio de Janeiro during the Vargas dictatorship (1937–1945), when the colonial urban fabric was replaced by a modern one characterized by high-rise buildings. This transformation was governed by building codes that prescribed layouts, alignments, heights, and architectural details, seeking to produce an orchestrated urban landscape of tall buildings. These regulations derived from the plan elaborated by the French urbanist Alfred Agache (1928–1930). A landmark in Brazilian urbanism, Agache’s plan aimed to resolve Rio’s functional deficiencies while projecting a modern image for the nation’s capital at the time. Although initially shelved after its presentation, its principles were revived and adapted by Mayor Henrique Dodsworth, who assumed office in 1937 and remained throughout the Vargas regime. Political and technical conflicts curtailed the plan’s scope to the urbanization of the Esplanada do Castelo and the construction of the monumental Avenida Presidente Vargas. Dodsworth employed Agache’s regulatory framework to secure façade alignment, volumetric unity, and stylistic coherence, thereby consolidating a monumental urban landscape of high-rise buildings and expansive open spaces. The article underscores how urban codes operated as mediating instruments between urban form, political imperatives, and the aspirations of architects, bureaucrats, and private clients, ultimately producing a modern urban core marked by monumentality and associated with corporatism and state intervention under Vargas.
Renowned for the radical housing proposals submitted to the Brasília competition (1956), Rino Levi also designed a significant number of residential buildings in São Paulo. While celebrated in architectural historiography for their modernist disciplinary innovations, his high-rise projects also provide valuable evidence for examining mid-twentieth-century social transformations in Brazil – shifts in gender relations and women’s roles, the circulation of domestic knowledge, the persistence of class and race hierarchies, and the ways architecture engaged with prevailing ideals of bourgeois domesticity. This article focuses on service areas - spaces of labor and for domestic workers – whose configuration was defined over the first half of the twentieth century, shaped by broad debates among diverse actors. The study analyzes architectural projects, building regulations, and household practices to address both continuities and changes in social relations and domestic labor. From a material culture perspective, it considers how these spaces contributed to the construction of class, gender, and racial identities. By recovering the debate in its full complexity, the article presents the service area as a site where competing forces and tensions intersected. In doing so, it reveals its central role in the negotiation of modern domestic life in Brazil, bridging architectural history with the social history of work and everyday life.
Essay on the Genesis of the Verticalization Process of the City of Rio de Janeiro
The article examines the initial process of verticalization in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which took place in the early decades of the 20th century, mainly in coastal and residential areas. By the late 1930s, the modern standard of the Rio de Janeiro apartment Building – intended as collective housing for the middle and upper classes– had emerged through a complex transformation from the collective dwellings of the 19th century. This new way of living reflected social and economic changes and was closely linked to cosmopolitan ideals and a seaside lifestyle. The upper-class residents of Flamengo maintained French habits, while the middle class adopted American values of practicality and efficiency, particularly in Copacabana, where they sought social mobility. The comparative study of the verticalization processes that took place in both neighborhoods, along with the analysis of their apartment building designs from the same period, reveals differences that reflect the historical and social specificities of each area, resulting in distinct architectural responses.
Technology, High-Rise Development, and the Rationalization of Construction: The Outinord System in Mar del Plata (1966–1976)
The traditional method of construction has been the most widely used worldwide for centuries. During the 1960s and 1970s, the industrialization of construction became a pressing imperative to address the growing housing deficit. Technological advances in reinforced concrete enabled the development of multiple prefabrication systems aimed at rationalizing construction costs and accelerating the production process. In Argentina, various methods were tested in both public works and the private sector. This article examines the implementation of the French Outinord patent in the city of Mar del Plata within the context of heightened vertical growth and the expansion of the condominium property regime, highlighting both its potential and its limitations. It argues that, ultimately, the transformations achieved were limited due to the lack of specialized labor, the high initial costs, and the persistence of conventional construction practices.
Turn to Abstraction: Externalization of the Structural Grid in the High-rise Building in Rosario in the 1950s
In the city of Rosario, during the 1950s, the growth of the real estate market under the con-dominium laws led to a reformulation of building design and production methods. In some cases, the architectural work demonstrated experimentation with its specific means: the structure was exposed and modulated as a grid, while the enclosures alternated between transparencies and planes of colour. These explorations, associated with a longed-for tech-nical and constructive rationality, brought to light formal affiliations and intersections between architecture and experiences linked to concrete art from the mid-1940s onward. The aim of this work is to contribute to the study of the typological, formal, and constructive innovations of this period, based on the analysis of five key buildings: Galería César (Noguerol, Rodríguez Nielsen & Brebbia, 1952-1954), La Segunda (Mariotti, Valenti & Molteni, 1955-1957), Amancay (Rassia & Cossio, 1958-1962), Mirador (Lange & Rébora, 1961-1966) y Copacabana (Pergomet y Kanter, 1961-1965). Their fundamental contribution lies in a rigor-ous reworking of expressive means based on variations of the structural grid. Far from being isolated projects, these works constitute manifestations of the effervescence of a cultural movement oriented toward bringing modernity back to the disciplines linked to art in Argentina.
This article investigates how values of gender, race, and class were manifested in the urban and architectural regulations of Curitiba, reverberating in the architectural plans of a set of buildings constructed between 1927 and 1972. The central focus of the discussion is on the configuration of the so-called “maid’s quarters,” a bedroom and bathroom designated for domestic workers. To this end, the 1919 Building Code and the 1953 Building Code were analyzed alongside the architectural plans of 89 apartments and advertisements published in the newspaper Gazeta do Povo. This triangulation of data made it possible to understand the interplay between physical configuration, legal frameworks, and social discourses surrounding housing and domestic work. As a result, the research reveals how the physical space of housing was designed to separate, monitor, and subordinate domestic workers. It argues that these quarters function as spatial devices that embody and update dynamics inherited from the slaveholding regime, reinterpreted and legitimized by modern urbanism and the real estate market.
High in the Sky: Emergency and Evolution of High-rise Buildings in the Central Area of Rosario in the First Half of the 20th Century
This article explores the emergency of the high-rise building in Rosario and its evolution during the first half of the 20th century, based on a qualitative and quantitative study of the entire production of this building sector in the city's central area. The emergence of the high-rise building in Rosario constitutes a significant element of the city's modernization process and a relevant element for the discipline, as the establishment of this new typology as the exclusive field of action of university professionals –architects and engineers– condenses the complexity of architectural and urban operations taking place in those years. In Rosario, this process began in the central area in 1906 with the project by architect Le Monnier for the Bola de Nieve Company. After substantial formal and distributive transformations in the 1920s and 1930s, the cycle closed in the mid-20th century, when the repertoire of high-rise buildings was drastically renewed with the first buildings with shopping malls –Edificio Galería Cesar (1952) and Galería Rosario (1953)– permeating the blocks and redefining the city's previous experiences with multi-programmatic high-rise buildings.
The Building for the Beneficencia del Meta
On January 19, 1963, the first recorded public architecture competition in the Colombian Eastern Plains was announced in the newspaper El Tiempo. This competition was for the design of the Beneficencia del Meta building, and the winning entry was submitted by architects Pedro Fernández and Eduardo Castañeda with a high-rise rental building proposal. For the city of Villavicencio in the mid-20th century, this project represented a significant leap toward modern verticality. Based on a thorough review of the available project documents, as well as their organization, description, and detailed analysis, this article demonstrates how the building transformed the urban landscape of the section of the city where it is located, aligning itself with Latin American discourses on height and modernity. This research found that the project subtly integrated certain characteristics of modern architecture into the building's various parts and elements. In summary, the Beneficencia del Meta marked a turning point in the typological and formal evolution of the center of Villavicencio, marking the beginning of a period that would be characterized by the gradual adoption of verticality in the intermediate city.
The article examines how the city of Montevideo regulated, throughout the twentieth century, the incorporation of high-rise buildings into its existing urban fabric, addressing the tensions associated with urban development and modernity. It proposes to characterize Montevideo as a “buffered city,” understood as a form of urban-cultural management that contains and conditions vertical impulses and the pursuit of singularity associated with tower buildings. To this end, the article reconstructs regulatory episodes, analyzes architectural cases –both built and projected– and considers the cultural discourses and imaginaries that accompany them. From an interpretative and historical-urban perspective, it argues that the city negotiates these impulses through strategies of moderation and balance, which help explain the persistence of certain urban forms and a particular mode of city-making.
This article offers a relational reading of modern urban verticalization by exploring the links between high-rise buildings, subterranean infrastructures, and circulation. Through the analysis of images, plans, and ideas from modern urbanism, it examines spaces and technical artifacts that shape a notion of “vertical urbanism” in which mobility and spatial stratification unfold both above and below ground. Using the concept of circulation as an organizing principle of the modern city, the article explores the imaginaries and technologies that enabled the three-dimensional expansion of urban space. It proposes the concept of vertical urbanism as a tool to include and analyze the vertical city not only in its upward growth, but also in its subterranean development.
Structural Typologies in High-Rise Residential Buildings by Architect Luis García Pardo
The work of Arch. Luis García Pardo is prolific and stands out for the unusual quality of the design of his static systems. This article seeks to identify and classify the structural strategies developed for the design of high-rise residential buildings constructed by the architect, establishing their relationship with spatial design. To this end, a comprehensive bibliographic review of the works has been carried out, archival information has been compiled and analyzed, and site visits have been made. Some of the designs can be considered local versions of structural solutions tested by the great masters of modernity, while others consist of innovative and highly original solutions that include vulnerable elements with high functional commitment. Four strategies have been identified: the design of regular frameworks of slabs, beams, and pillars; vertical support systems based on the connection of walls and flag pillars; cantilevered structures based on central cores; and suspended structures. It is essential to value the legacy of these works, considering their material and technical characteristics as values to be preserved. Recovering knowledge about their design and construction processes is essential in order to maintain, repair, and extend their lives.
Notes on a fluid shoreline. Topographies, practices, and early sensibilities of the beach in the city of Buenos Aires
This article explores the shifting spatialities of the Buenos Aires shoreline during the early stages of its development, from its initial topographical configurations to the transformations driven by modernization processes. It seeks to recover a phase of the city's riverside history that has often been overlooked or portrayed as a primitive stage, superseded by the construction of the port at the end of the 19th century. By focusing on this specific area, the article aims to contribute to a long-term historical narrative that acknowledges the temporalities and processes through which the shoreline has shaped the urban history of Buenos Aires. More impressionistic than systematic in its approach, the text examines, on the one hand, the topographies of the lower plateau, the ways in which it was occupied, the technical knowledge applied, and the interventions that partially formalized this zone of contact between the city and the river. On the other hand, it addresses certain social practices and their tensions with authority, as well as the sensibilities and interpretations that emerged around the shoreline within local cultural imaginaries.
Madrid: City and River. A History from its Riversides
Este trabajo tiene como objetivo secuenciar el proceso de conformación de la ribera del Manzanares, desde finales del siglo XVI, momento en que el rio pasó a ser un elemento referencial de la ciudad, hasta el reciente proyecto Madrid Rio que transformó el frente occidental en un gran parque ribereño que, siguiendo la línea del antiguo cauce, permitió la recuperación de los valores de sociabilidad y medioambientales perdidos a lo largo del tiempo. A través de una periodización de larga duración, se propone revisar las múltiples funciones, usos y representaciones de la ribera del Manzanares, desde su rol fundacional como límite defensivo, hasta su reciente reconversión paisajística. Este recorrido busca realizar aportes a una historia urbana de Madrid desde una lectura que entienda el borde ribereño no como un simple margen, sino como un prisma desde el cual se puede releer la ciudad en su conjunto y sus historias.
Urban waterfronts: temporalities, spatialities, dilemmas
This issue offers a historical perspective on urban riverbanks, understood as contact zones between city and water that exhibit complex physical, social, and cultural characteristics. Unlike other urban areas, riverbanks are both constrained and changing spaces, shaped by tensions between productive, recreational, infrastructural, and environmental uses. The articles in this dossier present research on various issues affecting these areas, such as major infrastructure projects; the spatialities, practices, and social interactions related to water and the beach; the role of riverbanks in socio-environmental conflicts in metropolitan areas; and the forms of social appropriation of coastal edges. Through case studies from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Spain that address different scales and temporalities, the dossier demonstrates how riverbanks have been—and continue to be—key sites for understanding urban history and the struggles over space in cities.
Between Swamp and Progress: The Role of the Ribeira Neighborhood in the Urban Modernization of Natal, Brazil (19th–20th Centuries)
This article examines the process through which the Ribeira neighborhood, in Natal was shape as a socioeconomic center between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the relationship between technique and nature. In a broader context of urban modernization and the city's needs to integrate into the global commercial network, Ribeira was chosen for its strategic location along the Potengi River. However, it posed challenges to this project, particularly due to a swamp within its area, impeding its connection with the rest of the city. A key symbol of this transformation was Augusto Severo Square, built over the former swamp and conceived as a space for leisure and civility, which later experienced neglect and loss of original design. The article aims to understand the role of the physical and territorial transformations that occurred in the neighborhood at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, based on the application of construction techniques and technologies from the perspective of urban and landscape reconfiguration. Using theoretical framework of Urban Environmental History and grounded in documentary sources such as newspapers and technical-administrative reports, the study discusses how technique was imposed over environment, contributing to a modern city project that found in Ribeira its privileged experimental ground.
Episodes of modernization in the city of Córdoba in the mid-20th century
The book addresses a selection of architectural and urban planning cases designed and/or executed in the city of Córdoba between the 1920s and 1970s. Exploring the problematic and polysemic nature of the notions of “modern”, "modernity" and “modernization”, the eight chapters comprising the compilation, edited by Juan Sebastián Malecki, analyze architectural and infrastructure works built in the provincial capital, as well as professionals and pedagogical experiences that were key to the modernization process of the disciplinary field. The publication constitutes a substantial contribution to the history of architecture and the city in the mid-20th century, raising questions for future research in relation to other episodes, programs, or geographical areas.
In 1939, the Buenos Aires Province Beach and Shoreline Urbanization Law was passed. This event marked the various processes of occupation and use of the southern shoreline, marking the transition from a territory characterized by informality, installation of temporary buildings associated with recreational activities, and its conflictive integration with traditional productive and service uses, to a formalization and modernization of the territory generated by the improvement of roads along with the construction of institutional headquarters linked to tourism. Using a diverse body of historical sources, we seek to describe the transformations and their material supports that were taking place in this setting, which was incipiently incorporated into the tourism landscape. We argue that this was a pivotal moment, involving a kind of competition –symbolically, but also physically– for the use of the beaches, which sought to be resolved through regulatory means.
South from Puerto Madero: Urban Renewal Projects and Policies in Quilmes and Avellaneda (2008-2023)
Over the past two decades, the southern and northern metropolitan conurbations of Buenos Aires bordering the Río de la Plata have been incorporated into a process of urban transformation of waterfronts, which began in the late 20th century with the Puerto Madero project in the City of Buenos Aires. Based on qualitative fieldwork, this article analyzes the public and private interventions carried out in the coastal strip of the municipalities of Quilmes and Avellaneda between 2008 and 2023. It explores the extent to which and how global guidelines supporting policies for the promotion of waterfront renewal are rooted in local contexts with distinctive characteristics. Although efforts were made in the southern part of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (AMBA) to replicate and expand initiatives aimed at attracting large private investors, which were successfully implemented in the central and northern areas of the city, the socio-territorial specificities of these municipalities introduced distinctive features that led to new management strategies for these areas. Among these strategies are the creation of public green spaces with an emphasis on environmental conservation and remediation; the heritage recovery of a productive and nautical-recreational past; and, finally, the incorporation of infrastructure improvements and urban quality enhancements in the popular neighborhoods located in these areas.
The Fluvial and Coastal as Dimensions of Urban Transformation
Riverfronts constitute complex spaces that act as catalysts for urbanization processes. Along riverbanks, a diversity of interests, activities, and imaginaries converge, shaping specific dynamics and characteristics. In Rosario, the central waterfront represents a development core that has transformed its functions and attributes: from a ferro-port interface to a public, cultural, and recreational space. This article aims to analyze Rosario’s waterfront as an emergent space resulting from the relationships woven between governmental and urban planning conceptions and various sociocultural practices and representations. To this end, the study develops a periodization divided into three segments: the invention of the riverfront as a productive and logistical fluvial edge (1852–1920); the gradual coastal transformation for civic and recreational purposes (1920–1983); and the reinvention and appropriation of the waterfront as a cultural, recreational, and touristic space (1983–present). The methodology adopts a qualitative approach that triangulates various documentary sources, images, and interviews in order to reconstruct the material transformations and sociocultural agencies of the urban-fluvial spatiality. The results posit the fluvial and coastal dimensions as key factors in the transformation of cities bordering rivers, where the interaction between governmental and urban planning conceptions and sociocultural practices and appropriations becomes particularly significant.
A kaleidoscopic view of the modernization process of three disciplines
The book under review presents kaleidoscopically the modernization processes of three disciplines, urbanism, photography and design, from particular episodes of the trajectories of Werner Hegemann, Grete Stern and Tomás Maldonado. The concept between spaces is the one that allows the construction of an assemblage between disciplines and geographies, intellectual transfers and personal displacements, exiles, migrations and cross-fertilization of ideas. Empathy or Einfühlung and new vision or neues Sehen are the notions that link the production of the aforementioned figures. The book reconstructs the multidirectional sense of the processes of disciplinary modernization, the different points of articulation and the modes of circulation of global practices and knowledge. The artistic and personal itineraries of the protagonists of the interstitial instances developed are the tools to highlight the scope and evolution of the concepts of empathy and vision. The research envisions the possibility of elaborating a narrative strategy that reinstates the particular moments of the analyzed episodes in a framework of integral meaning. It presents new ways to write modern cultural history from the overlaps, mismatches and incongruities, starting from a theoretical analytical matrix that allows the development of an integral narrative from the fragments.