The Peugeot Building Competition: Between the Tower and the Skyscraper

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate the 1962 Peugeot Competition and its context: What was the aim of the competition? What were the disciplinary debates around high-rise buildings? Was this a tower or a skyscraper? How was it situated with respect to existing urban regulations? Why was it called Peugeot? The analysis of the competition will allow us to investigate Argentina's early sixties context, at the same time we will focus on a series of discussions and regulations regarding high-rise construction that were taking place in the country, as well as analyzing a series of ideas that represented transformations on skyscrapers. Thus, we would like to propose as a hypothesis, firstly, that the choice of the name Peugeot for the building seems to have been a strategy by Richard to consolidate his relationship with the French automaker; secondly, that the competition was carried out independently to the solutions that the city of Buenos Aires was carrying out at the time in relation to its tertiary and skyscraper and the Catalinas Norte project; thirdly, that the winning project, which adopted a pure prism solution, was closer to a tower than to a skyscraper and, finally, that the proposal, although innovative at the time, soon became a repeated model. A model that, for a part of the architectural culture of the time, was an indication of the “crisis” of the skyscraper.