Over 40 months, during the decade of 30, a Sicilian-born architect planted southwestern province Buenos Aires as bizarre as monumental buildings. Only built slaughterhouses, cemeteries and town halls. To populate the plains of these demented moles futuristic, its greatest allies were the concrete ("liquid stone") and a fascist governor wanted to "dignify the region." By Juan Forn
We are in 1936, and public works (buildings and roads) are one of the key engines for economic recovery, in a country still ravaged by the global crash of 29. Under the motto "God, Country and Home," Gov. Manuel Fresco (a man whose fascist sympathies led him to publicly salute with raised arm, as well as shamelessly extol the Duce), decided to face an ambitious plan buildings in the 110 municipalities of the province to "dignify the official profile and landscape of the region." While the "patrician" Public Works Minister José María Bustillo awarded to his brother, the architect Alejandro Bustillo, the vast task of undeveloped beach in Mar del Plata Bristol, is for Fresco the huge backyard that was the southwestern province and it elects Salamone (an architect and civil engineer who is not very clear if he was born in Buenos Aires on June 5, 1898, in the village Leon Forte, Catania, exactly one year before) to "consolidate urbanistically" all those humble settlements, until the 30's, still being substitutes for defensive forts that were built in the late nineteenth century to protect the Indian, or were born as flashing dots concentration planted every fifty miles along the railroad advanced.
From overnight, Salamone becomes the most active projects across the province (then circulate two popular sayings, one of them says: "What have you built Salamone Fresh", the other fixes: "It does not move a brick without saying so Bustillo). While Bustillo redefines "gracefully" Mar del Plata with the neoclassical style that gives the Casino, Hotel Provincial, Municipal and high dry Rambla with its square, covered swimming pools and huge closets in their spas (a task that took ten whole years) to reach you Salamone less than forty months to the gigantic task of populating the remote villages of the plain of buildings monumental and impossible to define stylistically. A delusional that combination of elements of art deco and futurism, rationalist functionalism and monumental classicism (applied to buildings as symbolic as slaughterhouses, cemeteries and town halls) must add the effect produced by these mammoth buildings and alluvial superimposed the firmware crossbred Pampa horizon, dwarfing even those people flat houses and few roads. As if this were not enough, Salamone's work raises two additional problems for students of architecture: 1) that the guy did not leave a single theoretical or personal note written basing the reason for this stylistic decision (which leaves scholars pedaling in the air, to the extent that the investigator of CONICET Dardo Arbide pure product can claim it as Czech Cubism, Professor Mario Sabugo choose to name it Populist Futurism Buenos Aires, and the aforementioned Belucci speaks instead of the anticipatory it's Salamone iconographic style of Las Vegas and Disneyland), and 2) the ideological spirit that originated the project and ended megalomaniac "wrapping" (In the absence of reflections of itself Salamone), attributable to the fascist Fresco.
is no coincidence that the works of Salamone institutions focus on three-axis in the Pampean peoples' lives, such as cemeteries, slaughterhouses and municipalities. Fresco in the draft, it was imperative that the municipality will become the urban heart of each town (as well as the slaughterhouse and the cemetery should "announce" the entry and exit from the city center, one at each end). As for municipalities, the choice made monumentalism Salamone (rather than some variant of the council with arcades aggiornamiento or neoclassical palace) aims to convey paternalism state with a new sign of managerial efficiency ("the machine to handle.") To this point, the municipality must govern the lives of the people symbolically the architect topped with a tower building that exceeds height to the spire of the church, which was crowned with a huge clock (and not the evolution of the sun but municipality that tells time "official"). As for the slaughter, should be proud symbol of the new industry, with the increasing mechanization of dressing and imposing higher health measures, from the tiled rooms to electric pumps and laboratories (in this case, the absence of visible signs field outside the pens, Salamone opted to convert the front of the slaughterhouse in true symbolic ornamentation, which printed form of huge vertical blades). With regard to cemeteries, have family buried consolidating the sense of belonging to the urban settlement of the survivors. To strengthen that link, choose Salamone almost operatic emphasize the border between the city of the dead and the city of the living, building huge gateways (with giant cubist Christs and angels, or monumental inscriptions in letters RIP black granite alone reach fifteen meters, which must be added the height of the portal that contains them).
The great material Salamone ally in this task was the concrete (then called "liquid stone"), an innovation that allowed not only to conquer the heights of eloquence but hitherto unimaginable. That's what I sobreimprimía uniformly smooth white plaster (the democratic color as well as economic). It was also responsible obsessively interior design, combining always geometrically granite floors (which came from quarries in the mountains Pampa), with openings of iron, chromium metal and opal in the light fittings and walnut woodwork. The bathrooms were equally functional design and bright with floor tiles to ceiling moldings and fittings without unnecessary (it should be mentioned that in the case of furniture, his designs were not particularly happy, not in innovation and comfort, as shown in the official seat of the mayor of Laprida, whose support high repeat strokes of the tower that tops the municipal seat).
The supreme irony is that while Bustillo was devoted to open in Buenos Aires the tedious National Bank building, which according to their own statements to the press "set the starting point of the Argentine National Classic Style" (sic) the demented moles Salamone concrete rose in tiny towns, in addition to losses (in most cases, their population did not reach a thousand inhabitants, as Salliqueló, Urdampilleta, Saldungaray, Puan, Laprida Lobería Cacharí, Carhué or Carlos Pellegrini), almost behind the backs "of progress by the governor tried to arrogantly Fresco. Still, there are legendary stories, as told in Laprida, where the village leader, a man named Martinez, who had become mayor, intercepted the style cuatrero the train carrying farther south (apparently to Bahia Blanca) the disassembled parts of what would be the huge façade of the local cemetery, and at gunpoint ordered: "The cemetery is here."
With Castillo intervention that the provincial government in 1940, is interrupted by the roots for the urbanization of Fresco. Salamone not stay on the street precisely, in fact, still working for the government, but in the northern provinces, with the paving company that was created with one of his brothers, and devoted exclusively to the design of roads (mysteriously fails to address the whole structure). The new authorities force him soon after, into exile in Montevideo trouble, accused of irregularities in their relationship with the provincial government (here again, scholars disagree, but the process should not focus on his relationship with Cool-although the provincial leader not only always skipped the Architecture Department at the time of hire Salamone, but also he applied a "special" settlement-but one of the road tenders in Tucumán). The truth is that, after nearly three years of proceedings, Salamone is discontinued and returned to Buenos Aires, "claimed his good name." This includes, at least tacitly, the ideological aspect: while the official opening of the works in Tornquist, with presence and speech of the ineffable Fresco, waved, local media reported, flags with the Nazi swastika in the hands of the great Germanic community in the area (it is clear that we are talking about 1938, and then the flag "official" was the flag German Reich), none of the works I've read about Salamone is the slightest evidence of their political sympathies, out of his early affiliation (and soon disenchantment) with the Radical Party. Let's be clear: we are not talking about a very progressive. Until his death in 1959, Salamone had an evening gathering at his palace in the Calle Uruguay to 1200, visited by the historian Levene, the ineffable Arturo Capdevila (whom some school teachers yet to be defined as a writer) and Monsignor Lafitte among its members conspicuous. Surely there is a direct relationship between these gatherings and the stubborn new monumental construction abstaining from Salamone, but that's another of the mysteries surrounding the character. While in exile after his professional activity remained bounded to the paving company (by deleting the title of architect of the stamps and now involved only bidding neighboring, non-state), there are at least two buildings in Buenos Aires to his name , although the weather was responsible for anonymous, each in its own way: one of them, located on the corner of Avenida Alvear and Ayacucho, I took the plate with his signature when he blanked the facade, the other on the street Zufriategui , which hosted the paving business ran similar fate to remain under the shadow of the union of the General Peace and Libertador avenues when they built the bridge of Lugones. As for his most conspicuous buildings, which ghost town in the province, all but one (a fountain in front of the municipal palace of Balcarce, the people called "wedding cake", which was later demolished by the government) still foot. Slaughterhouses are mostly abandoned and in isolated cases by the deterioration in the roads caused by flooding, except the Blue (now home to abandoned dogs in the city), Pringles (become friendly museum carriages) and Balcarce (which has mutated into a chapel dedicated to San Cayetano). The municipal offices are housing authorities and housing are the cemeteries of the dead, chewed slowly through the bureaucratic neglect and over time, even Laprida, who was able to get the leader Martinez at gunpoint.
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