Edificio SAFICO, Modernity and Anachronism
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.
Following my reconciliation with the Microcentro, I often found myself back there after a walk not far from this district. It’s always by chance, a building intrigues me, I approach it, from there I see another and a chain reaction begins. I move from one building to another like a boat following the lighthouses along the coast.
One of the most fascinating of these lighthouse buildings is the SAFICO at the end of Avenida Corrientes, which I often arrive at after these unconscious leaps. With no ornamentation and punctuated by multiple square windows like hundreds of dead pixels, the smooth façade can appear unfinished. Behind the coldness of the façade is a tower almost 100 metres high. It seems to unfold on itself like a telescopic pole, ending up as a sort of a ziggurat pyramid with 6 levels. The rationality of the facade and its staggered construction in fact respond to the same objective, a volume sculpted by restrictions and the attempt to optimise all available space.
This tower, completed in 1934, was the city’s tallest skyscraper at the time of its construction, a real guide to the city, and I think it’s hard to imagine what the reception of this building was like 90 years ago. I recently came across a photo by Horacio Coppola from 1936, showing men and women in the foreground, wearing suits, dresses and hats from another era, as well as trams and old cars. But above all, in the background, the SAFICO dominating the city. The contrast is striking, both in terms of its scale and its modern architecture, which is completely at odds with what’s happening in the street below. This contrast makes it difficult to place the photo geographically; we try to get our bearings, but the discrepancy blurs our knowledge. For someone unfamiliar with the city, you could very well be in Chicago in the 1930s, for example, or even the victim of a photomontage.
This sense of a spatio-temporal rift reminded me of the photos of the inauguration of the Barcelona pavilion at the same period, where the tails and top hats clash with the modernity of the open plan. This staging of modern architecture can also be found in the Stein villa, where the sheet metal of the car in the foreground, although also synonymous with modernity, seems to suffer from the comparison with the free design of the façade.
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The SAFICO is still a building apart in the Porteña city, but the vehicles that pass in front of its façade every day reverse the temporal balance of power. The more recent car industry is one of constant reinvention, synonymous with unbridled capitalism where individual mobility is one of the most precious commodities. The evolution of cars over the last 100 years, with their now limited power, their design, their lines, their capacity, and more recently the move towards electric cars, has not been followed by architecture. Not that the systematic development of vehicles is something to hope for, but the incessant renewal is the consequence of a machine that cannot stop or else it dies.
But the hype is happening at a speed that has long since outstripped architecture. Some might disagree with me and want to superimpose the latest cars with a building by Zaha Hadid, Nouvel or who knows what other architect.
It’s true that the prototypes blend in quite well with their buildings. But that only reinforces my point: what have these architects done to improve the spaces where we live, work, love and die? Their monumental works are synonymous with disconnection from a world where we are fighting for a livable future, monsters of ego with unbridled budgets, the architecture of whim by almost self-proclaimed starchitects. I can see how it’s useful for selling a dream, and I agree with the sensations it can bring, but it’s easy to agree that it doesn’t make it a building that stands the test of time, the test of our societies.
Without lapsing into nostalgia, or even a pastism that I totally reject, SAFICO constantly attracts and moves me, because it’s a sign of a modernity that’s long past and outdated, a beacon in the city, a curious landmark. Its sheer size crushes me, its neutrality questions me and even annoys me. It’s far from being an uncritical building, of course, but this stack of boxes topped by a Mayan-inspired pyramid is a time bridge that still has a place in the city where it stands. What was once the tallest building in the city is also a symbol of contradictions, both my own and shared by others, but by being at the antipodes of an infinite growth cycle it is perhaps more rooted in reality than many of its neighbors. It’s a building that has witnessed the various changes in the city, a building that existed before the Obelisco and will probably still be standing after our visit. In a way, the SAFICO was anachronistic when it was built, but today it is perhaps finally finding its place by confronting us with our limits and our place in the city.
