Actually I'm sort of fascinated by this building, which is about a mile from my apartment. It looms over Santa Fe, a big thoroughfare. And from a distance, it's incredibly ugly, not to mention sort of menacing:
(Now with all these pictures, if you want to appreciate the true ugliness, or magnificence, of this building, you'll have to click to see the larger pictures.) Anyway, as you can sort of see from the little pic here, it's a big dirty building with a whole bunch of creepy antennas on the roof. Almost like some kind of malevolent control center. But it's way, way worse from behind:
This just looks like the headquarters of the secret police or something. Maybe a prison, though all that telecom on the roof gives it a much more ominous character, like there's a bunch of people in there spying on all of us.Anyway, I've been seeing this building from a distance for a long time, and it always creeped me out, and I always thought it was incredibly ugly. So naturally, I rode my bike over there to take some pictures of it.
As I got closer, it became more clear that this is an apartment building. It's in a residential area, lots of terraces. And it's big -- really big, forty, forty-five stories. And actually, coming closer, you could see that it had some style (at least from the front side -- the back side is an atrocity, no matter how you look at it).
I rode up to the entrance, and, lo and behold, this is a fancy building. It's got its own little plaza, set back from the street a little, a sure sign of upscale aspirations here in buenos aires.
More interesting up close is the concrete work on this building. As you can see from the above, the many vertical columns on this building are sculpted concrete, kind of interesting, actually. I walked up to the plaza, and before I got sushed away by a security guard took a few pictures. The one below shows that not only does the building have concrete columns, it also has a kind of concrete facade, horizontal concrete slabs connecting the vertical columns, all set in front of the building about a foot or so.
This is no slapped-together fancy apartment building, this concrete facade was clearly carefully considered, and must have taken a lot of effort to build. So in a way, this building really is fantastic, it's serious architecture. I believe this use of concrete qualifies this building as an example of "brutalism", a fantastically-named school of architecture that was popular in the fifties and sixties, and maybe into the seventies. BA has a few other examples of Brutalism. Makes sense to me. Brutalism in its day was thought to be very progressive and visionary, and argentina aspires to that. But on the other hand, it's also a kind of cold expression of raw power, and lord knows certain elements in argentina have aspired (and achieved) and continue to aspire to that.
I love this building because I think it does show both the positive and negative sides of this architectural style. Certainly it's cold and dreary from some angles, and also has a very menacing side. But from another perspective it does have a certain powerful elegance, some kind of combination of beauty and strength. I like the detail in this last picture, the way the concrete columns fold over the top of the building. This shows a certain aesthetic integrity. Lord knows it wasn't essential to make the top of this 45-story monstrosity elegant, but they did, and I think that does demonstrate at least some kind of commitment to excellence, some ambition.
Still, from a distance, it does look like the secret police headquarters. So I guess that's maybe where Brutalism really stumbles.
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