The Grid and the Park

Front matter

Public Space and Urban Culture in Buenos Aires, 1887-1936

Adrián Gorelik

Translated by Natalia Majluf

Introduction

A Metropolis in the Pampas 1 The Grid and the Park: An Approach to Public Space 7 Historiographical Paradigms 11 City and Pampa 16 The Park against the Grid? The Problem of Reformism 22 A Cycle of Reform: The Impulse and Its Brakes 31 PART ONE Figurations [From Sarmiento to the End of the Century] 37 Chapter 1. A New City: The Utopia of “Argentine Thought” 43 1. From the Quinta Normal to Central Park 45 2. Palermo and Buenos Aires 60 Chapter 2. A Concentrated City: The Shape of Order 71 1. Centrality and Regularity: The Will to Form 72 2. A New Public Space and Its Figures 86 Struggles for Memory 87

The “Argentinian Haussmann”: What Is City Government? 99

Chapter 9. End of the Cycle: Second Birthday 1. De Vedia's Operation

A Reactive Utopia: The Avant-garde Reclaims the Center 2. The Conflicting Dimensions of Public Space

The “Republic of Inhabitants”

Disaggregations

About the Author Bibliography Index

About Latin America Research Commons

346 379 397 409 418

421 423 447 455

Illustrations

The illustrations are integrated within the text; each time a reference is made to one of them, the illustration number is indicated with a callout placed in the outer margin.

Regarding the maps of Buenos Aires, it is necessary to offer a few explanations: The difficulty of reading them is aggravated by the fact that during the period under study the practice for their orientation changed: in the nineteenth century, they were mostly arranged with the north to the right, and in the twentieth century, with the north toward the top. For this publication, the decision was thus made to always orient the north according to nineteenth-century representations, which means that the port of Buenos Aires is at the bottom of the maps (and the north is to the right). This homogenization (which applies to both complete plans and to details) is intended to make them easier to read, although from the graphic point of view it forces the legends of some historical plans to appear at a 90-degree angle.

The graphic diagrams were made by Silvana Ferraro for the original edition.

Fig. 1. Diagram of the city of Buenos Aires in 1887. 2

Fig. 2. Carlos Maria della Paolera, Plan of the Regional Expansion of the Metropolis. Office of the Urbanization Plan, Buenos Aires, 1933. 2

Fig. 3. Engineering Department, Plan of the Lands Transferred by the Province of Buenos Aires for the Federal Capitals Expansion, 1888. Lithograph. Museo de la Ciudad, Buenos Aires. 5

Fig. 4. Plan comparing the overall surface of Buenos Aires and London, published in La Nacion, June 6, 1904. 5

Fig. 5. Department of Public Works, Buenos Aires, Plan of Buenos Aires with Annexed Lands, 1904. Instituto Histórico de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. 13

Fig. 6. Diagram of the layout of the parks created or proposed between the end of the century and 1904. 14

Fig. 7. Department of Public Works, Buenos Aires, Plan of Buenos Aires (detail of the Parque Chacabuco sector), 1904. Museo Mitre, Buenos Aires. 14

VIII THE GRID AND THE PARK

Fig. 8. Thomas Holme, A Portrait of the City of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania, 1683. Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Fig. 9. Drawing by Le Corbusier comparing urban layouts: traditional Paris, New York, and Buenos Aires. From La ville radieuse. Paris: Editions de Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, 1935.

Fig. 10. Juan Manuel Blanes, An Episode of the Yellow Fever in Buenos Aires, 1871. Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo.

Fig. 11. John Bachmann, Bird's-eye View of Greenwood Cemetery, Near New York, 1852. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 12. John Bachmann, editor; Frederick Heppenheimer, printer. New Yorks Central Park, 1863. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Figs. 13 and 14. Illustrations to Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect, 1822-1903: Forty Years of Landscape Architecture; Being the Professional Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Senior. New York and London: Putmans Sons, 1923.

Fig. 15. Dirección de Hidrografía del Reino de España, Plan of the Buenos Aires Harbor (detail), 1864, Asociación Civil Rumbo Sur. Fig. 16. Samuel Boote, The Gates of Palermo, Built in 1875 at the Beginning of Sarmiento Avenue to Give Entrance to the Park, c. 1880. César Gotta collection.

Fig. 17. Londons Northwest: Map of Marylebone, Regent's Park, Hampstead, and Highgate, 1875. British Library Digital Collections. Fig. 18. Olmsted, Vaux and Co., General Plan of Riverside, Chicago, Illinois, 1869. Chicago Lithographing Company. New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Fig. 19. Diagram from Leonardo Benevolo, Diseño de la ciudad - 5. El arte y la ciudad contemporánea, Barcelona. Gustavo Gili, 1977. Fig. 20. Pablo Basch; Gunche, Wiebeck and Turte, lithographers, Plan of Buenos Aires from the Guía Nacional, 1895. Archivo General de la Nación.

Fig. 21. Diagram of Mayor Alvears main public works.

Fig. 22. José Marcelino Lagos, Project for Buenos Aires, 1867. From Ricardo Llanes, La Avenida de Mayo. Buenos Aires: Kraft, 1955.

Fig. 23. Plan of the Project for Diagonal Avenues Developed by Mayor Crespo, 1887. Instituto Histórico, Buenos Aires.

ILLUSTRATIONS IX

Fig. 24. Pablo Blot and Alfredo Ebelot, Navigable Canal Beltway Project Joining the Maldonado Stream with the Riachuelo, Carried out by Blot and Ebelot, 1887. Detail from a project in Museo Mitre, Buenos Aires.

Fig. 25. Napoleone Tettamanzi, Plan for a New Capital for Italy, 1863. Plan reproduced in Paolo Sica, Storia dell'Urbanistica. LOttocento 1. Rome: Laterza, 1977.

Fig. 26. Department of Engineers of the Province of Buenos Aires, Julio Vigier, engraver, Plan of La Plata, c. 1882. Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno.

Fig. 27. Sociedad Fotográfica Argentina de Aficionados, Buenos Aires Rooftops, 1891. Archivo General de la Nación.

Fig. 28. Harry Grant Olds, Avenida de Mayo, c. 1915. Mateo Enrique Giordano collection, Buenos Aires.

Fig. 29. Félix Achille Saint-Aulaire after Alcide dOrbigny, Plaza de la Victoria with the Pyramid and the Recova Vieja, c. 1830. Lithograph published in Voyage dans [Amerique méridionale. Paris: Pitois-Levrault, 1835-47.

Fig. 30. Benito Panunzi, The Pyramid and the Recova Vieja, 1867. Carlos Sánchez Idiart collection, Buenos Aires.

Fig. 31. Pablo Blot and Juan Buschiazzo, Project for Remodeling the Plaza de Mayo, 1883. Diran Sirinian collection, Buenos Aires. From the photographic album by Emilio Halitzky, Mejoras en la capital de la República Argentina. Intendente Torcuato de Alvear, 1885.

Fig. 32. Unknown photographer, Plaza de Mayo, c. 1910. Archivo General de la Nación.

Fig. 33. The figure of the “Lord Mayor”: George-Eugéne Haussmann, 1854. Image drawn from Leonardo Benevolo, Diseño de la ciudad,

5. El arte y la ciudad contemporánea. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1977. Caricature of Mayor Alvear, drawn from El Mosquito, April 24, 1887, and of Prefect Pereira Passos, Rio de Janeiro, drawn from O Malho, March 18, 1905.

Fig. 34. Diagram showing the population of Buenos Aires in 1887 and 1895, from Charles Sargent, The Spatial Evolution of Greater Buenos Aires. 1870-1930. Tempe: Arizona State University, 1974.

Fig. 35. Office of Public Works, Buenos Aires, Plan of Buenos Aires, 1895. Instituto Histórico de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires.

Fig. 36. Ferdinand Boehm, cartographer; W. Bembé, engraver. Hobrechts Plan of Berlin (“the police plan”), 1858-62. Zentral und Landesbibliothek Berlin.

X THE GRID AND THE PARK

Fig. 37. J. C. Loman Jr.; Smulders & Co., Plan for the Expansion of Amsterdam, 1875. Amsterdam City Archives (KOKA00396000001).

Fig. 38. José María Reyes, Plan of Montevideo, 1829. Mechanical Curator Collection, British Library Commons.

Fig. 39. Plan of the City of Montevideo, 1889.

Fig. 40. William Bridges after John Randel, This map of the city of

New York and island of Manhattan as laid out by the Commissioners appointed by the Legislature.... 1811. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Fig. 41. Map of New York City South of 118th Street, 1858-62. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Fig. 42. Captain Wysocki, First Plan for Palermo Park, c. 1870. Holmberg Library Archive.

Fig. 43. Detail from a Plan of Buenos Aires, c. 1890. From Sonia Berjman, ed., El tiempo de los parques. Buenos Aires: IAA, 1992.

Fig. 44. Samuel Boote, Palermo Park, c. 1885. Archivo General de la Nación.

Fig. 45. Unknown photographer, Woman Cycling in the Lagoon Pavilion (Pabellón de los Lagos), c. 1908. Archivo General de la Nación. Fig. 46. Unknown photographer, Inauguration of Parque Patricios, 1902. Archivo General de la Nación.

Fig. 47. Gymnastic Exercises at Parque Patricios, Caras y Caretas, October 3, 1908.

Fig. 48. “Quantum mutatur ab illo!”: PB.T., Buenos Aires, February 13, 1909.

Fig. 49. Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, Garden Suburb Design for Hampstead, London, 1905. Hampstead Garden Suburb Archives, Hampstead.

Fig. 50. Models for Curved Streets, from K. Henrici, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 1894.

Fig. 51. Carlos (Charles) Thays, Plan of Palermo Chico, Buenos Aires, 1912. Dirección General de Fiscalización de Obras y Catastro, Buenos Aires. Fig. 52. Unknown photographer, Congress Plaza, 1911. Colección Lorenza Trionfi Honorati, Buenos Aires.

Fig. 53. Joseph-Antoine Bouvard. Proposal for Congress Plaza, 1907. Revista de Arquitectura (February 15, 1909).

126 126

ILLUSTRATIONS XI

Fig. 54. Diagram showing the route of official parades and protest marches in the years of the Centenary, with the location of exhibitions and monuments as laid out by the national and municipal governments. 181

Fig. 55. Ricardo Rojass House on Charcas Street, designed by Angel

Guido, Buenos Aires, 1927. Photograph by Adrian Gorelik. 196 Fig. 56. Tucumán House, reconstructed by Mario Buschiazzo in 1943. summa, Buenos Aires, nos. 215-16 (August 1985). 196

Fig. 57. Luigi Brizzolara and Gaetano Moretti, First Prize for

the Competition for the May Monument, 1907-1910. Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Arquitectura Publica, Ministerio

de Hacienda, Buenos Aires. 206

Fig. 58. Joseph-Antoine Bouvard, Proposal for the Remodeling of the Plaza de Mayo. 206

Fig. 59. Census Sections of the Federal Capital, 1904. 214

Fig. 60. Diagram of progressive urbanization of Buenos Aires from

the city’s foundation to the 1920s. From Charles Sargent, The Spatial

Evolution of Greater Buenos Aires, 1870-1930. Tempe: Arizona State University, 1974. 214

Fig. 61. Alfredo Berisso, head of the Drawing Department; Manrique Ruiz, Adolfo Kliman, draftsmen, Plan of the City of Buenos Aires with the General Layout of the Streets, 1916. Buenos Aires, Department of Public Works of the City of Buenos Aires. The University of Chicago

Map Collection. 221 Fig. 62. Unknown photographer. Mataderos, c. 1918. Dirección de

Paseos, Museo de la Ciudad, Buenos Aires. 221 Fig. 63. Joseph-Antoine Bouvard, Bouvard Plan, 1909. Biblioteca

Esteban Echeverría, Legislatura de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. 233

Fig. 64. Benito Carrasco, “Plan for the future Buenos Aires”, Caras y Caretas, February 22, 1908. 238

Fig. 65 and 66. Photographs of the areas in which Carrasco imagines “the city of the future” From Caras y Caretas, February 22, 1908. 238

Fig. 67. Plan of Buenos Aires (detail), 1895. Museo Mitre, Buenos Aires. 258

Fig. 68. Plan of Buenos Aires (detail), 1904. Instituto Histórico de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. 258

Fig. 69. Unknown photographer, Grocery Store on the Corner of the Slaughterhouses, 1899. Published in Caras y Caretas, March 4, 1899, Archivo General de la Nación. 259

Fig. 70. Unknown photographer, Construction of the Park, c. 1905. Archivo General de la Nación. 259

XII THE GRID AND THE PARK

Fig. 71. Department of Public Works, Buenos Aires, Plan of Buenos Aires (detail), 1916. Museo Mitre, Buenos Aires.

Fig. 72. Land Register Plan (detail), 1941. Instituto Histórico de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires.

Fig. 73. Unknown photographer, Tambo Criollo Dairy in the Central Zoological Gardens, c. 1916. Dirección de Paseos, Museo de la Ciudad, Buenos Aires.

Fig. 74. Unknown photographer, Childrens Theater at Parque Avellaneda, c. 1916. Dirección de Paseos, Museo de la Ciudad, Buenos Aires.

Fig. 75. Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan for Chicago, 1907-1909. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Fig. 76. United States Senate Park Commission and U.S. National Geographic Society. The Mall, Washington, D.C. Plan Showing Building Development to 1915 in Accordance with the Recommendations of the Park Commission of 1901. Map drawn with the participation of Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 77. J. C. N. Forestier, Draft Project for Buenos Aires Avenues and Parks. Published in Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Proyecto Orgánico de Urbanización del Municipio, 1925.

Fig. 78. Julio Otaola, Location of the new civic center. El centro cívico de Buenos Aires, 1933.

Fig. 79. Julio Otaola, Detailes plan of the new civic center designed to connect Rivadavia and Centenario Parks. El centro cívico de Buenos Aires, 1933.

Fig. 80. Werner Hegemann, Barrio Fiorito, 1931, photographs illustrating “Als Stadtebauer in Südamerika III. Der Sieg der Randsiedlung über die Mietkaserne; Wasmuths Monatshefte fiir Baukunst und Stádtebau (Berlin) 16, no. 3 (1932).

Fig. 81. Unknown photographer, Chubut and Triunvirato Streets, 1935. Dirección de Paseos, Museo de la Ciudad, Buenos Aires.

Fig. 82. Horacio Coppola, Corrientes at 900, 1936. Horacio Coppola Archive.

Fig. 83. Horacio Coppola, Corner of Jean Jaurés and Paraguay, 1936. Horacio Coppola Archive.

Fig. 84. Horacio Coppola, Barrio Saavedra, 1936. Horacio Coppola Archive.

Fig. 85. Horacio Coppola, Avenida del Trabajo y Lacarra, 1936. Horacio Coppola Archives.

ILLUSTRATIONS XIII

Fig. 86. Horacio Coppola, Dividing Walls, 1931. Horacio Coppola Archive. 349

Fig. 87. Le Corbusier, Ouvrir les yeux, from Précisions, sur un état présent d larchitecture et de lurbanisme, Paris, 1931. 352

Fig. 88. Werner Hegemann, photograph taken in Buenos Aires in 1931 illustrating his “Schinkels Geist in Südamerika, Wasmuths Monatshefte fir Baukunst und Städtebau (Berlin) 16, no. 7 (1932). 352

Fig. 89. Horacio Coppola, A Street in Almagro, 1936. Horacio Coppola Archive. 352

Fig. 90. Unknown photographer, Enlargement of Corrientes Street, April 1936. Dirección de Paseos, Museo de la Ciudad, Buenos Aires. 366

Fig. 91. Unknown photographer, Construction of 9 de Julio Avenue, 1937. Dirección de Paseos, Museo de la Ciudad, Buenos Aires. 366

Fig. 92. Carlos María della Paolera, General Movement of Passenger Traffic. Della Paolera, Urbanismo y problemas urbanos de Buenos Aires

(Buenos Aires: Honorable Concejo Deliberante, 1929). 375 Fig. 93. Horacio Coppola, Diagonal Norte, 1936. Horacio Coppola

Archive. 382 Fig. 94. Horacio Coppola, Avenida de Mayo, 1936. Horacio Coppola

Archives. 382 Fig. 95. Horacio Coppola, Port, 1936. Horacio Coppola Archive. 383

Fig. 96. Alfredo Guttero, Silo, c. 1928. Oil on cardboard. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes collection, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Fondo Nacional de las Artes Donation, 1970. 383

Fig. 97. Rodolfo Franco, Murals in the Buenos Aires Subway Line D, c. 1936. 383

Fig. 98. Alberto Prebisch, General Perspective of Plaza de la República with the Obelisk at the Center, 1936, as published in La Prensa, March 10, 1936. 385

Fig. 99. Dirección General de Arquitectura, Ministry of Public Works, Proposal for the Remodeling of the Plaza de Mayo, 1934, published in Revista de Arquitectura, Buenos Aires, XX, no. 167 (November 1934). 385

Fig. 100. Horacio Coppola, Plaza de Mayo, 1936. Horacio Coppola Archive. 388

Preface to this Edition

It is rare for studies on Latin American cities conducted outside the North American academy to be published in English. The sociology of publishing has proven with overwhelming figures that translations from Spanish to English— and the same could be said of translations into French—are concentrated almost exclusively in the field of fiction, while in the social sciences and humanities the transit between languages moves almost exclusively in the opposite direction. This is not the place to analyze the asymmetries of the international circulation of knowledge, but recognizing them makes the privilege that this edition represents even more evident, an honor for which I must extend my thanks to the audacious translation program carried out by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in the launching of this collection and, especially, to the personal commitment of Natalia Majluf, who not only promoted the initiative in her role as editor in chief of the Latin America Research Commons (LARC), but also took charge of the translation itself.

The word audacious also applies to LARC’s decision to open the collection with a book that is not too amenable for translation, not because of the typical difficulties of a Spanish full of subordinate clauses and impersonal sentences so refractory to English precision, but because of the number of assumptions about Argentine culture on which it is based. In fact, good friends who like the book very much have often criticized this feature: an excessive immersion in details of local culture that results in a certain hermeticism, making the narrative difficult to comprehend for an international audience.

My response to these concerns is that the approach is not at all a pursuit of a partially nationalist program: on the contrary, the book encourages comparative reflection, examining the case of Buenos Aires in the light of what happened in other cities of the region or the world, as a strategy to denaturalize beliefs settled in historiography and, more generally, in Argentine culture. A comparative reflection is essential in order to accurately ponder the transformation of Buenos Aires in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century as one of the most intense and interesting international urban experiences, not only because of the explosive growth generated by an immigration process with few equivalents in the world —which itself generated singular sociocultural dynamics—but also because of the originality of the urban instruments that were put into play. One of the first consequences of placing Buenos

XVI THE GRID AND THE PARK

Aires on the international chess board of cities has been the questioning of the notion of Haussmannization, which has hindered in the last half century a proper appreciation of the processes of urban modernization in Latin America.

Any hermeticism would have to be attributed to the rules of the game of what is perhaps the books biggest challenge: the production of an urban perspective for cultural history. Placing the material city in intimate correspondence with the dimensions of social, political, and cultural life demands very elaborate interpretations of each of these facets. If this book makes it necessary to re-read the work of a writer like Jorge Luis Borges, it is because the focus on the city demands modifications of what we knew about both Buenos Aires and Borges’s work. This is, I believe, a test for an urban perspective: when it works, when it is really productive, is when it manages to produce new interpretations of all elements in play, breaking the habit of the writing of urban history, which often takes culture as a given context for its explanations of the form of the city, and that of cultural history, which often reductively positions the city as a neutral setting for its analyses of culture.

The cultural/urban density of a history thus plotted is almost a starting point, a research and writing program. The focus on the city leads us to put very different types of figures on the same plane of analysis, a move that places completely contrasting cultural worlds into collision: for example, a fundamental intellectual such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and an opaque bureaucrat like engineer Carlos María Morales, whose technical work on the plan of Buenos Aires allows us to read a whole state imaginary of late-nineteenth-century conservative reformism that brings new light on Sarmiento’ ideas. It also imposes hermeneutic perspectives on urban operations themselves: I think of the analysis of the work of two Buenos Aires mayors, Torcuato de Alvear and Mariano de Vedia y Mitre, who radically transformed, not merely the city but the very weave of urban life and its representations, yet who did not leave behind a single text on their projects or any form of document to support an analysis of their ideas outside of what emerges from their own actions. In order to “read” the city or urbanistic actions, to interpret them ideologically, it is necessary to reconstruct complete sections of social, political, and cultural history, linking the advances in each historiographic field with urban form and with disciplinary traditions of urbanism in a way that can only make the narrative more complex.

It is worth remembering here that this re-centering of the city in history was fueled by the extraordinary vitality that the city gained in the debates on modernity in the 1980s: although it may seem strange to those of us who lived through it, that moment is now part of a history almost as foreign to the present moment as the one revisited in this book. The Grid and the Park could not have been written without the powerful updating of some classic interpreters of the metropolis such as Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, or Siegfried Kracauer, which those debates updated and revised, nor without the works of Carl Schorske, Thomas Bender, Marshall Berman, or Richard Sennett, or those

PREFACE TO THIS EDITION XVII even closer to us of Richard Morse, Beatriz Sarlo, Carlos Monsiváis, or Nicolau Sevcenko. It was an international conjuncture, with a strong presence in Latin America, in which the discussion on modernity focused on the study of cities and assumed a high political and cultural intensity.

If these works put the city on everyone’s lips and showed very well what cultural history gained from being situated in a city, they also allowed this book to pose a slightly different challenge: how to extract from the city itself the keys to interpret culture. Perhaps it was an attempt to respond to a demand implicit in much of Morse’s work: If modern cultural life has its center in the city, and if a distinct type of culture is produced in each city, how do we identify the specific links that are drawn between the two, that produce them mutually? How can we find, inscribed in the urban form itself, the keys that give a culture its profile? This book does not offer definitive answers, to be sure, but it positions these questions as the basis for a necessary exploration. And I would like to believe that it is this experimental spirit that motivated LARC’s gamble on this translation.

The preface to the first edition sufficiently describes the network of intellectual and academic groups from which this book emerged in Buenos Aires in the eighties and nineties: the only thing that can be said here is that after such a long time I am happy to re-sign each of those acknowledgments. Regarding this edition, I would like to make a special mention of the Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, which has been editing this book since its publication in 1998, keeping it alive with continuous reeditions, for the transfer of rights that has facilitated this translation, and to the translation program “Sur, of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the Argentine Republic which supported it.

Finally, I would like to thank the friends who helped me obtain the excellent photographs that illustrate this edition. To Luis Priamo, great expert in the history of photography, who always offers with enormous generosity his time and knowledge; to the heirs of Horacio Coppola, and especially to Jorge Mara, the person responsible for managing his estate, all of whom, with great generosity, have been accompanying and making possible the research on the photographer and the publications that result from it; and to Lucio Piccoli, Eduardo Gentile, and Daniel Becker, whose invaluable collaboration provided me with archival materials that were so difficult to access during the pandemic. And, of course, I would also like to thank Julieta Mortati, who is in charge of the editorial management of LARC, to whom we owe a great deal of the success of this project.

ADRIAN GORELIK Buenos Aires, October 2021

Preface to the First Edition

This book is a revised version of a doctoral dissertation on the emergence and failure of metropolitan public space in Buenos Aires that was presented to the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires. The research was supported by a CONICET Doctoral Fellowship between 1989 and 1994, based at the Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas Mario J. Buschiazzo, Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Once the scholarship ended, I was able to continue my work thanks to the Programa de Historia Intelectual, Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, where I am still doing research today. Additionally, between December 1994 and March 1995 I benefited from a stay at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. I finished the final version in September 1996. With regard to the process of writing the thesis, I would like to thank especially my adviser Jorge Francisco Liernur, who always led the way. Regarding its conversion into a book, I have tried to follow—although I have not always succeeded—the attentive suggestions of those who helped me in reading it again once I had defended the dissertation: Anahi Ballent, Beatriz Sarlo, and Graciela Silvestri, as well as Oscar Teran, director of the series in which this book is published, and Maria Inés Silberberg, to whom we owe the intelligent editing.

But these are only the most specific acknowledgments. In fact, I believe that if every history book is the result of a series of exchanges—hypotheses discussed, influences received, cultural climates—this condition is amplified in the case of a doctoral dissertation, because its incubation is necessarily more public and, in general, because it is part of a guided, more collective formation. That is why dissertations are usually accompanied by a long list of debts and acknowledgments. I do not pretend to be original: also here the main ideas that structure the work were presented and submitted for discussion in articles, in papers to congresses, and in seminars, participating and feeding on the stimulating academic climate that was forming in Buenos Aires in the eighties, with its intense permeability toward other areas of cultural life; so that a list of all those from whom I learned in those exchanges would be endless. I would simply like to point out the way in which those exchanges were imprinted as the original mark of this book: the (then surprising) initiative that the studies on the city and architecture that I had been carrying out should lead to a doctoral

XX THE GRID AND THE PARK thesis in history was due to a generous suggestion by Leandro Gutiérrez and Luis Alberto Romero, made in the corridors of one of those congresses.

Above all, I would like to point out that, in addition to the academic exchange of knowledge, no doubt fundamental, the climate in which this book was formed has given meaning to my work ever since, from the point of view of its insertion into a cultural fabric and an intellectual project: I know that I would not have written this, or anything else, without the incentive of imagining that this writing could be part of a collective enterprise, even if loosely defined, but with precise cultural and ideological implications. Thus, rather than merely mentioning this or that reading that the preliminary versions received, the acknowledgments take the form of a description—succinct, to be sure—of the intellectual map that made possible not only the writing of the book, but also the very formulation of a perspective from which to begin to think about these problems. It is a perspective that is made up of three types of views on the city, history, and culture, embodied in three distinct, yet always interrelated intellectual groups within which we have shared many years of work and friendship.

First, there is the group on history and criticism of architecture and the city formed by the initiative and under the influence of Jorge Francisco Liernur over fifteen years ago, in which dialogue and training continue. The approach to the problems of the city and architecture that appear in my research are undoubtedly the product of a collective elaboration in that group. Especially to Liernur, Fernando Aliata, Anahi Ballent, Graciela Silvestri, Mercedes Daguerre, and Alejandro Crispiani, I owe so many debts that at times I see my book as just a chapter of a work that we should sign together: in fact, collective writing has always been a common practice among us, and in particular with Silvestri I have signed a number of articles that over time anticipated much of the hypotheses that I develop here.

Second, I must mention the Programa de Historia de las Ideas, los Intelectuales y la Cultura, which was formed by Oscar Terán at the Instituto Ravignani, Universidad de Buenos Aires. With over ten years of uninterrupted operation of the seminar, which, month after month, has allowed a heterogeneous group of researchers to discuss their work. In a very unorthodox way, in the imperceptible ways in which an artisanal knowledge is transmitted, a common horizon to think about cultural history was built in that seminar that has decisively marked my perspective and my writing. Out of that group, Teran formed the program at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes in which a team of researchers has been working with a now more continuous degree of exchange since 1994. Among those colleagues, I would like to highlight Carlos Altamirano and Jorge Myers, due to the intensity of their influence throughout this time.

Finally, the magazine Punto de Vista, which I joined in 1992. In regular meetings and discussions with Beatriz Sarlo, Maria Teresa Gramuglio, Hilda Sabato, Carlos Altamirano, and Hugo Vezzetti, I have been able to approach a mode of critical intervention on the world of ideas that has completely redefined my perspective on intellectual work; a mode of political and aesthetic

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION XXI production on the present that necessarily sheds light on the ways of questioning and imagining the past, which gives it meaning. Thus, because it opened up those paths for me, the reference to Punto de Vista is linked more broadly to other kinds of experiences that have allowed me to think about the history of Buenos Aires in a more enriching way. On the one hand, a very particular aesthetic-intellectual enterprise, the cycle of three video essays on Buenos Aires made by Rafael Filippelli with a script we produced with Silvestri and Sarlo: the perspective of film, literature, and art showed me a different city and a different history, which, although I don’t know exactly how, I would like to see operating in my work. On the other hand, a series of political ventures of rather uncertain fortune, linked to the formation of a new left field in the city at the very moment when a very long cycle to gain its institutional autonomy was closing: I do not know if my historicist and culturalist approach to the problems of the contemporary city has been of any use to my comrades at every turn, but I do know that the more intimate knowledge of those problems, of the mechanics of political, social, and institutional functioning—knowledge to which I owe so much to Miguel Cincunegui, director of the Centro de Gestión Urbana, Oficina del Ombudsman de Buenos Aires, where I collaborated all these years—gave me innumerable clues that I have applied in my research in an immoderate way.