Forget Perón, conquer the market, create a national style: the different "meanings" of Buenos Aires National Library

Buenos Aires National Library (1962-1991) by Clorindo Testa, Francisco Bullrich and Alicia Cazzaniga can be observed by different perspectives. Many of them are in some way related with the idea of Nation and with governmental politics. The building represents an important step in Testa’s creative trajectory. Together with the almost contemporaneous headquarters of the Bank of London and South America, this project is a masterpiece of his concrete architecture of the 1960s, abundant of metaphors, allusions, trespasses and irony and definitely released from all suspicions of Corbusianism. But the competition for the National Library is probably no less interesting than the building itself. Its history could be considered as the history of two strategies. On one side the competition was supposed to provide “the answer to the ones who doubt about our concern for the spiritual future of the Argentineans”, as Culture Secretary Luis Mc Kay said announcing it, and to still all doubts about its liking to Peronist voters (which support has been decisive in 1958 elections). On the other side, architects strongly encouraged the use of competitions as system to assign the works trying to exclude potential competitors, as engineers. Competitions were presented as the most adequate mean to reach works capable of expressing the mission of the new “democratic” institutions born after Perón’s fall. A parallel discourse showed the freedom assured to designers by this system as an essential condition to reach finally the national architecture pursued in vain during the 1940s and the 1950s. Francisco Bullrich, by his writings in the journal Summa and most of all by his book La arquitectura argentina contemporánea (1963), was possibly the main partisan of this thesis, presenting the project for the National library as a promising example.