Vesper No. 7 | Sky | Fall-Winter 2022
Federico Deambrosis
Australe
Keywords
Buenos Aires, Le Corbusier, journey
The mapping of the
celestial vault south of the equator has been common ground for generations of
European navigators since the Renaissance. At the end of the 1920s, another
European turned his gaze to a starry sky unprecedented for him: he was Le
Corbusier who, invited to give a series of lectures in the city, entered the
port of Buenos Aires aboard the transatlantic liner Massilia on the night of 28
September 1929.
Almost as if it were a
founding act for modern architecture on the continent, Le Corbusier's South
American voyage, visiting not only Argentina but also Uruguay, Brazil and
Paraguay, has acted – ever since historiographical frameworks that have
become classics and then again in more recent works – as the first
chronological term for observations conducted both from inside and outside
South America. But reversing the perspective, the journey can be interpreted as
a turning point in the Swiss architect's urbanistic discourse. Among the
visions elaborated in 1929 and later collected in Précisions, the one
for Buenos Aires is undoubtedly the most attentive to grasping the
characteristics and opportunities of the existing city. Years later, Le
Corbusier's attention was drawn back to the outlined and perhaps forgotten
schemes by the arrival at 25 rue de Sèvres of two young Argentine architects,
Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, who would undertake the development of
the hypotheses formulated in 1929 under the supervision of the
‘master’. Ferrari and Kurchan, together with Antoni Bonet, returned
to Buenos Aires in 1938 with the task of obtaining the commission to draw up
the plan. From their joint initiative germinates a group, called Austral, whose
aim is to ‘movilizar la sociedad’: a purpose certainly congruent,
if not exactly coincident, with the realisation of the plan.
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