Modern fervor in Buenos Aires. The transatlantic gaze of the Austral Group and Horacio Coppola in 1939

Abstract

Buenos Aires was a promising city in the late 1930s. The Obelisk, built in 1936, was the icon of a functional city that was beginning to open up to an ideal of urban renewal. Despite this, Argentine architecture was in a confused moment, assimilating Western forms with more or less success, but always adopted as foreign. The aim is to delve into how the pages of the Manifesto of the Austral Group responded to this crisis of the collective of Argentine architects and students by proposing, especially from its graphic content, a reformulation of Architecture and Urbanism for Buenos Aires. An ideological construction gestated in Paris and imported to Argentina, the result of the European heritage lived by its main authors -Antonio Bonet Castellana, Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy and Juan Kurchan- based on the urban premises of the CIAM, the thought of Le Corbusier and certain liberties close to surrealism. This transatlantic construction, elaborated by and for Buenos Aires, but conceived in a Western key, had only one collaborator from outside the group, the Buenos Aires photographer and "self-taught" Horacio Coppola. In this way, and focusing on this collaboration between architects and photographer, the article proposes to question the very novelty of the Manifiesto Austral para Buenos Aires, since Coppola's three photographs contributed, in part, to reaffirm the avant-garde character inherent to the genre, although these same photographs had already been published previously by Coppola in the famous book “Buenos Aires 1936. Photographic Vision”. The deconstruction, identification, and analysis of the graphic material on pages four and five under the title "Buenos Aires" aims to delve into how the Manifesto provided a new look at the Buenos Aires capital. A look that always had the long shadow of Le Corbusier behind it and that would place this publication within the category of Fotomanifestos.