Month: February 2023

As we continue our stay in Buenos Aires, we are spending our time in avid exploration of the city.  Traveling around both on bike and on foot, we have become captivated by the architectural expression of the sides of apartment buildings.  

Most apartment buildings have the footprint of a long rectangle.  The short side faces the street, and the long side extends back from the street.  For the long sides of the rectangular volume, there are typically two or three vertical cuts.  These cuts are made to give light and ventilation to the apartments that do not face the street.  What has focussed our attention is the sculptural manner in which these vertical cuts are made.

The cuts are typically very wide at the top of the building, and they narrow the lower they are.  The wider opening at the top brings as much light and ventilation as possible into the lower apartments.   The visual effect, once you tune into it, is very powerful and aesthetically pleasing.

You can see similar vertical cuts in the sides of apartment buildings in, for example, NYC.  Yet these are always straight vertical shafts with no stepping.  

As the four photos show, there is a wide variation in the geometry these forms.  The stepping of the cuts is typically not symmetrical.  That is, one face is typically not the mirror image of the other face.  The juxtaposition of how the cuts widen from side to side gives an amazing sculptural and organic quality to what are very ordinary buildings.  The best ones have a ziggurat quality to them.  

The sketch below uses this geometry as a jumping off point for a possible architectural form.

Yesterday in Buenos Aires, we had another out of this world architectural experience.  This time, it was at the Chacarita Cemetery.  In our travels, we enjoy visiting cemeteries, given their very pure layouts and designs.

After you enter thru a very well done neoclassical building, you are deposited in sectors of mausoleums, which were built in the late 1800s.  This section of the cemetery is a design wonder in and of itself.  Each mausoleum tries to outdo the other.  Our joke was that the best way to take it with you is to build yourself an expensive burial chamber designed to out do the ones next to you.  

Then you see what at first glance appears to be a vast, open plane, with low modernist structures and elements dotting the landscape.

As you start to traverse this plane, you realize that there are multiple levels of burial crypts below.  This is what is called the Pantheon.  This was built in the early 1940s. Long, rectangular openings are cut into the plane, which bring light into the levels below.  You descend staircases, which allow you to then wander thru the vast lower levels.  It is a very powerful architectural expression and experience.  It is as if the visual world has been reduced to nothing but mass and light.  It is pure archetype. We spent nearly 2 hours in fascinated exploration.  

As we researched the history of the cemetery that afternoon, we realized that the Pantheon was designed by a woman, architect Itala Fulvia Villa.  This was another stunning realization.  She was Argentina’s first female architect.  Based on our research so far, it seems that she studied with LeCorbusier.

Our photos do not, of course, capture in any way the profound experience that the cemetery induces.  The website titled Sexto Panteon has very nice aerial views, with an aerial video.  It also has floor plans and sections, as well as interesting features such as descriptions of some of the caretakers of the Pantheon.  

After an experience like this, you wonder why a design with this power is not included in the run of the mill architectural history books that they tell you to read in school.  Our predisposition to worship culturally approved icons, I guess, precludes excellent pieces like this.  

We have had similar revelatory experiences in cemeteries.  The Poblenou Cemetery in Barcelona is an experience unto itself, with the above ground burial niches extending to what appears to be infinity.