96 Travel
Contradicting his elegant and formal
personal appearance, Clorindo Tes-
ta’s oeuvre has avant-garde content.
His buildings tend to generate a dis-
tance between them and the viewer,
cancelling the inertia of our everyday
perception, shedding a new light on
architecture’s constituent elements
in a shift that makes them jump to
the foreground. Testa’s light-hearted
approach deconstructs the urban,
cultural and disciplinary context of
his work all at once. The following
examples explain this.
Function as a plastic substance. The
continuity of functionally prefigured
layouts is the first thing to be called
into question. Testa broke down the
organisational programme into com-
ponents in order to put them back
together in a new way. The National
Library in Buenos Aires, conceived
in 1961 and opened in 1992, saw a
radical reversal of the customary way
of distributing the central nuclei of
the archive and reading room. Testa
separated the two functions. He
moved the archive underground and
perched the reading room atop large
pillars, offering library goers unex-
pected views of the River Plate. The
competition rules for the Aerolíneas
Argentinas office tower required
construction to take place in stages.
Testa was the only participant to
propose building the entire structure
at once, leaving a number of parts
empty, to be filled over time.
Skewed imagery. The Italian-Argen-
tinian architect meticulously re-
moved all traces of local character,
dissolving the limits between build-
ing and land, introducing surprising
metaphorical allusions or refusing
synthesis. For the Bariloche Founda-
tion, Testa merged houses and ter-
races with the sloping land. Meta-
phorical allusion is seen in the table,
cow or ship suggested in the Nation-
al Library. At Macabi CountryClub,
houses are belvederes, tanks or tem-
pietti. The Samarcanda Cultural
Centre is a tree. La Plata auditorium
is like a gigantic animal. Not all the
analogies are so immediate: at theMachines for looking:
the architecture by Clorindo
Testa in Buenos Aires
portrayed by Michele
De Lucchi. Text by Jorge
Francisco Liernur