Transparency or splendor? Perret, Bustillo and Álvarez: the spectacle of modernity in State architecture in Argentina

Abstract

A museum, a hotel-casino, a bank, an exhibition pavilion, a theater or a ventilation tower, all State architecture: what could they have in common? It is a set of works whose civic character was in the core of the public commission. Both Alejandro Bustillo and Mario Roberto Álvarez and their associates (all followers of Auguste Perret from diverse points of view) understood, in different ways, that a show of modernity had to be offered. The problem of the representation of state architectures supposes a tension between the search for a national and modern character. Excluding each other or merged, these characters are accentuated in certain programs and political conjunctures. Transparency has historically been naturalized as an inherent condition of so-called modern architecture. So did the use of reinforced concrete. At the intersection of both resources, the luminous and monumental splendor had been part of the spectacle of modernity. A look at some cases helps to show the alternatives deployed in the face of similar demands made by different governments: the request to give a symbolic character, whose urban presence contrasts the two faces of metropolization, the spectacle and the anomic indifference.