Banco de Londres.
Banco de Londres de Buenos Aires, 1960-1966. SEPRA, arquitectos; Clorindo Testa, arquitecto asociado. Vista, la lógico constructiva del pie derecho. Diez estudios argentinos: Diego Peralta Ramos, SEPRA, p. 135.
TRADITIONAL CITY: STRUCTURES AND URBAN FORM
The powerful conception of the architectural project as infrastructure invaded even the works carried out in the urban context, with a predominance of the search for a structural or material definition that gave an comprehensive sense to the building while assuming structural challenges within the framework of the traditional urban fabric. The corporate headquarters of SOMISA (Argentinean Steel Society) was designed by Mario Roberto Álvarez y Asociados (1966-72). In a triangular plot in the historic center of Buenos Aires, the building consists of six basement levels for parking and services, a large entrance space at street level and the first basement for public areas, exhibitions and auditorium, and 14 floors above ground. The structure was made entirely of steel with large Vierendell trusses supported by two prestressed reinforced concrete circulation cores, with no interior columns. On the outside, two steel porticos composed of columns and beams also collaborate in the wind resistance of the glass façade made with double glazing for climate control 13 . The glass enclosure follows the traditional urban shape and highlights the prominence of the structure as the urban identity of the building. The predominance of structural exploration in relation to the urban fabric had its maximum expression in the Banco de Londres y América del Sur (1960-64) by Clorindo Testa and SEPRA (Sánchez Elía, Peralta Ramos and Agostini). Bullrich confirmed this building was conceived as part of the architectural design of the city, emphasizing how the creators
established a continuity of scale and mass to achieve an integration of the work with the adjoining buildings and affirm its contribution to the traditional street, by its shape and by the urban experience it encouraged 14 . If the external form maintained the constants of the traditional urban fabric, the interior was masterfully organized around a decidedly urban space. In a magnificent structural exercise, they conceived a system of lateral supports, with the collaboration of the median walls and sculptural interior stairs that supported a top block from which the slabs hung to create floating trays with open plans. The lateral supports to the street were formed by systems of laminar columns which, when elevated, assumed a trapezoidal form, like immense perforated ribs. In the back a curtain wall defined the enclosure. Far from any programmatic concept, the structure asserted the emptiness and amplified the interior space, extending it beyond the urban environment. Many projects notoriously presented a leading structural proposal in the urban environment, in which the large dimensions of the pieces allowed a certain undifferentiation of the interior space, and a powerful impact in the context of the traditional urban form, as in the cases of: the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Mendoza (Tedeschi, 1964), the Banco de Londres y América del Sur in Rosario (SEPRA, 1968-73) or the National Library (Testa, Bullrich, Cazzaniga, 1962-1992), to name a few examples.
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