A Couple of Architectural Tourists in Buenos Aires
- mbarhydt
- Jun 20
- 6 min read
The first thing you notice are the trees. My partner and I were enroute to our hotel in the Palermo Hollywood neighborhood of Buenos Aires from the EZE airport in a taxi arranged by the hotel. Coming from the desert city of Lima, Peru where we had been visiting family and a friend, the greenery was a pleasant shock. Every block we passed was lined with large trees, giving us nighttime glimpses of low-scale apartment buildings, stores, offices and cafés in a jumble of architectural styles. We had looked at city maps and had read a little about Palermo, but this was a more intimate neighborhood than we expected to find. It was hard to believe that this was part of the sprawling Buenos Aires metropolis.
It only got better in the daylight. Walking through Palermo Hollywood and the adjacent neighborhood of Palermo Soho was fascinating. There was no prevalent architectural style or building type. Nestled together on a single block might be the remnant of a one-story 1930s Spanish Neo-Classical building repurposed as a garage, home or café squeezed between a two-story 1960s Spanish Colonial style brick residence and a three-story 1950s apartment building vaguely Moderne in appearance. The rest of the block might be filled out with a mid-rise contemporary apartment building and a mix of two and three story concrete residences that could date anywhere from the 1940s to the 1970s. In a couple of alleys in Palermo Soho, two story buildings that were otherwise unremarkable were individually colored in bright paint, often mixed with murals or graffiti, giving each a distinct identity. Here and there we found streets where the one and two story Spanish Neo-Classical style residences were largely intact but this was a rarity. We were continuously amazed by the contrast of dissimilar building styles and functions, different from block to block, with no discernable logic behind their placement.
Recoleta was a bit of a letdown after two days of walking around Palermo, although the buildings are larger and grander. Maybe it’s because we didn’t spend much time here. Many evoke late 18thcentury and early 19th century French architectural styles; it’s not uncommon to read of comparisons to Paris. But Recoleta has no wide boulevards like Paris; however, the streets are tree-lined like Palermo.
If we were disappointed with Recoleta, the Centro area certainly made up for it. With its broad avenues; plazas; monuments and parks; cathedrals and block-long buildings this is the cultural and political heart of Buenos Aires. We started at the famous Plaza de Mayo, the historical center of Buenos Aires fronting the Casa Rosada, which houses the president’s office. The Plaza is where the mothers of the children that disappeared during the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976—1983 still hold their weekly demonstrations. The obelisk-shaped Pirámide de Mayo (May Pyramid) in the center was built in 1811 to celebrate the first anniversary of Argentina’s independence from Spain. The equestrian monument directly in front of the Casa Rosada commemorates the Argentinian independence war hero, General Manuel Belgrano. Thousands of rocks, inscribed with the names of people who died during the COVID pandemic, now surround the monument. Opposite the palace is The Cabildo, a colonial town hall built in the late 1700s.
It was also in the Centro that we saw some of the most elegant and some of the most bizarre buildings on our entire trip. One of the most impressive is the Beaux-Arts style Palacio de Justicia de la Nación, or Palacio de Tribunales, facing the Plaza Lavelle, a small park. Completed in 1910, the complex houses Argentina’s Supreme Court and Federal courts. Sadly, one of the strangest buildings we saw is across the street from the north side of the Palacio. It’s a glass and stone office building called the Mirador Massue (aka Edifico Tribunales Plaza). It incorporates the former “mirador” (corner tower) from a 1903 Art Nouveau building that used to sit on the site.[i] It was someone’s bad idea of “historic preservation” that only serves as a reminder that something amazing must have been here.
On the other side of the Plaza Lavelle sits the Teatro Colón, South America’s most famous opera house. Even without its opera house history, it stands on its own as a significant work of architecture. The style is Beaux-Arts filtered through the lens of Italian Renaissance Revival. It was completed in 1908 but took 20 years to design and build. The succession of architects (Italian, Italian—Argentinian, Belgian) explains the eclectic architecture.[i] Across the street is the imposing, Neo-Classical Escuela Presidente Roca, a public school completed in 1902. Looking at the two together, you have to wonder if the Teatro Colon architects were in some way trying to “out do” the Escuela Presidente Roca architect.
Wandering away from the Plaza Lavelle area, we were again both shocked and awed by some of the buildings we saw. Sometimes, they were side by side. In the city’s historic center, smack next to the magnificent 1927 Edificio Miguel Bencich, is the Edificio Florida 40. It was a collaboration between the Swiss architect Mario Botta and Argentine architect Haig Uluhogian. The graphic nature of the 1989 building, with the light and dark gray horizontal banding, the enormous striped column that arises up through the center, and the inverted ziggurat base, is so jarring that it left us speechless, and not in a good way. With a little more patience, we did notice the attempt by Botta and Uluhogian to align major horizontal elements of the Florida building with that of the Bencich but these gestures get lost in the cartoon-like nature of the entire façade.
Like every other tourist who visits Buenos Aires, we had to cross the famous Avenida 9 de Julio. It’s considered to be the largest avenue in the world. 16 lanes are dedicated for cars, 4 lanes are dedicated for buses and a broad, landscaped pedestrian median separates the north east and west sides. At the median’s widest point is the Plaza de la Republica where the giant, shrubbed “B A” that appears in almost every tourist’s photos sits, and the Obelisco that looks like a smaller version of the Washington Monument. The Obelisco was built in 1936 to celebrate Buenos Aires’s quadricentennial.
Just south of the Centro is the smaller neighborhood, San Telmo. Unlike Palermo, where it is the massive trees lining each street that visually holds the neighborhood together, here there is a cohesive architectural quality to the neighborhood, a sense of what old Buenos Aires must have been like. Many of the buildings date from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and while some of them appear to be just short of falling down, there’s still an elegance remaining in their detailing that captures the eye. The spiritual center of the neighborhood is the San Telmo Market, home to numerous small, unique retail shops, and reasonably priced restaurants representing all facets of Argentinian cuisine. The market is an architectural delight—a kind of smaller version of an old European train hall, with street facing stone and glass facades, and soaring, vaulted interiors constructed from steel tracery, metal and glass.
Our last afternoon in Buenos Aires was spent in the new neighborhood of Puerto Madero. Puerto Madero, in its monumental blandness, was a hollow exclamation point to all that we had seen before. The neighborhoods we had experienced up until now shouted vitality and individuality. Puerto Madero—all the buildings seemingly cloaked in variations of the same metal and glass—whispered timidity and anonymity. It was like Buenos Aires had been turned inside out.
And yet the elegant couple we saw dancing the Tango as we crossed the pedestrian bridge from Puerto Madero back to the Centro was a reminder that Buenos Aires has a vibrant, intangible soul, expressed through its people and its architecture, that we have never found anywhere else.
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teatro_Colón?utm_source=chatgpt.com, accessed May 13, 2025.
[i] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirador_Massue?utm_source=chatgpt.com, accessed May 12, 2025.
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