Confrontation and Reconciliation, a walk through the center of Buenos Aires
This chronicle is part of a collection of impressions gathered during numerous walks in the Argentine capital. They are all available in three languages (EN,ES,FR) and are part of the MIBA project developed on Senses Atlas.
The first place I landed when I arrived in Buenos Aires was in the center, or more precisely the Microcentro, on calle Florida. I was greeted in the middle of winter by thousands of offers to change money ‘cambio, cambio’, by the smell of grease coming out of the ventilation grilles of the fast-food chains that can be found in the 4 corners of the planet, I was stunned by the deafening music of the shops and the countless offers to buy all sorts of things (phone cases, sweets, various items of clothing, etc). That was my first contact with the porteña city, an incessant, aggressive hustle and bustle orchestrated around a relationship built at various levels with money.
The Calle Florida has the merit of being one of the few pedestrianized streets in the city, but a feeling of claustrophobia soon compels us to leave this bottleneck.
No matter which direction you turn, you’re confronted with crushing buildings, forming avenues striped by incessant traffic. Another dizzying sensation, where it’s hard to slow down and look up without being jostled. The only breathing space in the face of all this density is the Plaza de Mayo to the south. There is something reassuring about the mass of tourists, but the desire to understand a city is rarely generated by contact with the most touristy places. The Avenida de Mayo, at the end of which is the Congreso, some fifteen streets further on, offers a glimpse to the east. But newcomers are more likely to be drawn to the Diagonal Norte, which is presided over by the Obelisco.
Following this point of focus like the needle of a compass is in fact a mistake, as it becomes our way out of the urban chaos, the sight on arrival proves discouraging. As you come into contact with Avenida 9 de Julio, you are more impressed by its width (140m!) than by the obelisk’s 67-metre height. The buildings spread out on either side, like two pitiless walls through which a torrent of vehicles flows. It’s impossible to cross the avenue in one go – you’re plunged straight into Frogger, with the soundtrack of bus brakes, like a tired gasp in the face of the frenzy of the place. The Obelisco seems quite alone, like a forgotten stake marking a territory that no longer belongs to it. In fact, I envied him his ability to stand still in the midst of all this. In the center of Buenos Aires, stillness is a luxury, movement is compulsory.
Faced with this congestion, the newcomer that I was excluded himself. Escaping from the center was the solution to give myself time to adapt; I rarely came back, often out of obligation, backwards, which didn’t help our relationship. The gravitational pull of porteño centralism generates a magnetic attraction that’s hard to shake off. The majority of metro lines converge on the city center, and even with a great deal of ill will it’s impossible to ignore this urban black hole. I didn’t understand, I didn’t fit in. I didn’t understand the tourists who were sent there either, I disagreed with the guides and their agreed tourist itinerary, and for a long time I remained deaf to the arguments of my friends who live there.
The covid crisis, which closed many businesses, has also left its mark, with whole streets almost abandoned, blinds down, and a form of marginality trying to find a place to exist. It has become the face of the country’s crisis, an illustration of abandonment and misery, located just a stone’s throw from those who monopolize the wealth.
I finally learned to reconcile myself with the center by gradually returning to it. I progressed like a snail, from the outside in, following an imaginary spiral. As time went by, I gradually developed ties with the area, starting not far west on Avenida 9 de Julio, with the bookshops on Avenida Corrientes, and the slices of pizza I ate in 3 minutes at GüerrÃn before going to the Lugones for a movie. In the end, it’s a very commercial-cultural approach, which comes to the fore when you step out of the metro at night and the neon lights hanging from the facades of theaters and restaurants project you back to New York. Then there’s Plaza Lavalle, with its hybrid neo-modern skyline between the Teatro Colon, the Edificio de Renta at the corner of Libertad and Avenida Cordoba, the portico of the Escuela Roca overlooked by the concrete graft of the ILSE, and of course, when it comes to hybridity, the chimera between glass and art nouveau that is the Massue Mirador.
Further south is the Congreso, of course, and its square which during anti-government demonstrations is a dream of total pedestrianization, or the insolence of the Palacio Barolo two streets away.
The left wing of the 9 de Julio gradually became part of my life, while the right wing resisted me a little longer. Of course, not far to the south is San Telmo, whose authenticity fights a daily battle against commodification. To the east, on the other hand, the soulless artificiality of Puerto Madero will never appeal to me, burying the myth of the city’s reconnection with the river.
And then one day, on a Friday morning when the city is less crowded than usual, without warning, everything lights up. Once past the 9 de Julio, we head up Diagonal Norte, arriving at the intersection with Suipacha and Sarmiento, and the answer is right in front of us. 6 buildings come into view, almost all of them freed from the rectangular typology sculpted by the city’s grid layout. Here, they’re triangular, chiselled by the Diagonal Norte, which opens up the Manzanas criss-crossing the center. The Edificio Antonio Pini (Diagonal Norte 875), built in 1933 by Alejandro Varangot, features two imposing birds of prey supporting a balcony covered with a sculpted frieze, in the middle of which the designer’s head sits proudly.
Just ten meters from this façade, the nh latino hotel building (Suipacha 309), a project from the past few years, features a building with rounded corners covered in simple aluminum and glass stripes.
Ten meters further on, the Edifico Strajman (Diagonal Norte 917), built by Alejandro Enquin in 1928, presents a radically different Spanish neoplateresco style, with its facade covered in sculpted details. These are reflected in the glass façade of the nh hotel.
These three buildings face each other almost head-on, but coexist, and this is where the key finally appears. Until then, I’d seen the center as a place of conflict, but it turns out to be the place of confrontation. The Diagonal Norte (like the Diagonal Sur a few hundred meters to the south) is already a formal confrontation with the city’s grid plan. The eclecticism of the architecture should not be considered only in terms of each individual building, but as a whole. In fact, following the example of the Diagonal Norte, these buildings, all with different architectural styles, follow the same template, allowing the avenue to be traced in the city.
The contrast, the confrontation of styles, of years, it’s on this pooling of elements that the heterogeneous construction of the center takes place. Further along the Diagonal Norte, we cross the calle Florida, my gateway to the city, and a kind of transmutation circle takes shape, a pentagram formed by 5 buildings facing each other. The Edificio Bencich (1927), with its two domes and eclectic architecture; the neoplateresco Banco de Boston (1924); across the street, the Edifico Equitativa de la Plata (1929), proudly Art Deco; the Edifico Florida 40 (1989), a post-modernist bank by Mario Botta and Haig Uluhogian; and finally, the Edificio Miguel Bencich (1927), a cousin of the first. Of course, you have to have the time, or even the space, to look up. Often, the incessant flow of cars, buses and people forces us forward, giving us the impression of watching a landscape pass by too quickly through the train window. But in the end, this contradiction also gives rise to a confrontation between the worker and the tourist, the passer-by and the inhabitant. A collective vision that fights against the individualistic narrative of conflict.
I later discovered that in the heart of the Microcentro, where the calle Florida is located, there’s an area known as La City, the sub-neighborhood where almost all the country’s banks are concentrated.
The impression of the omnipresence of a relationship to money that I perceived at the time is confirmed even in the built heritage. The Banco de Londres (1966), a monumental Brutalist building by Clorindo Testa and his peers, becomes almost ironic in this context. A concrete carapace, awkwardly embedded in the urban density of the center, a syndrome of the inward-looking nature of the place. Money as an individual value, work as a collective force.
Of course, my vision of the calle Florida and its surroundings has matured, but I still feel the irritation that can be evoked by a building whose facade is disfigured by an advertising screen defending a fast delivery service, or the melancholy when faced with an abandoned street, emptied of its activity, a true paradox in the face of an increasingly congested center. I also find serenity in imagining the forced transformations the district has undergone, and the various witnesses that still exist, intact in the face of the test of time: the Edificio SAFICO and its impassive rationalism set back from Corrientes Avenue maintains this.
In the end, my reconciliation with the Microcentro was achieved through acceptance – the acceptance of my own confrontation with the neighborhood, with its buildings facing and overlapping each other, with its contradictions. It’s difficult when you arrive in a city in which you’d like to fit in, not knowing how to find your place. But perhaps the best way to achieve this is to accept to confront it, and finally succeed in seeing the world, being at the center of the world and remaining hidden from the world.