Cambridge, March 12, 2013
You may not believe this, but as that the Casa Rosada was
growing to its present dimensions, at the opposite end of the square the
Cabildo of Buenos Aires was shrinking at about the same rate.
Generations of Argentinean schoolchildren had the image of
the Cabildo as it was on the rainy May 25 of 1810 engraved in their memories: a
plain two-story horizontal volume with a central clock tower and five bays of
arches on either side. Yet, if you
went to Plaza de Mayo, let's say after 1940, you'd see a similar building, but
of much more vertical proportions and with not five but only two bays of arches
on either side of the tower. How
come?
Actually, before it began to shrink, the Cabildo had one
last growing spurt. In 1880, the notable architect Pedro Benoit extended the
tower by ten meters and resurfaced the whole building with Neo-Renaissance
ornamentation. That would be a short-lived
new glory. Less than a decade
later the Cabildo would loose three bays on its north side to the opening of
the grand Avenida de Mayo, the new main axis of Buenos Aires. It also lost its tower.
What was once a simple but proud public building had turned into
undistinguished urban fabric. It
narrowly survived several calls for its demolition and in the early 1930s lost
another three bays, now to the south, to leave room for the newly opened
Diagonal Sur. With this loss
however, the building regained its symmetry. Calls were now for the restoration of the colonial
building. In 1940 the architect Mario
Buschiazzo, a pioneer of historic restoration, completed the reconstruction of
the Cabildo, bringing back not only its plainer language but also its original
clock tower, even if a tad shorter, to account for the new proportions of the
building. And the Cabildo was now
a historic monument.
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