Estudio para viviendas en Casa Amarilla, Buenos Aires, 1942-1943. Plantas primer y segundo piso superior. Williams, Claudio: Amancio Williams: obras y textos. Primera edición. Buenos Aires: Donn, 2008, p.134.
Hospital en Corrientes, 1948-53. Amancio Williams, arquitecto. The Museums of Modern Art. Latin American in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 . Segunda edición, Nueva York 2015: Departamento de Publicaciones MoMA, p. 108.
The university city was placed on the summit of Cerro San Javier and conceived as a total urban environment that included university buildings -labs, libraries, institutes and classrooms- residences and sports and social facilities. A series of esplanades composed the teaching area, with a group of large seven-story blocks of 105 x 195 m, whose structure was defined by a grid of 15 x 22 m and 5.5 m high, where the modulation enabled flexibility and internal adaptation for academic purposes. The communal center was a huge area covered by a series of conical -concave and convex shells- on a reinforced concrete structure with 20 m high columns, susceptible to grow in any direction, which ensured the necessary climate protection and allowed the free arrangement of the premises below. The university residence would house more than four thousand students, with a superblock shape of 480 m in length, 21 m wide and 30 m high, built in three stages of 160 m each. The superblock assumed the clear and precise role of representing the presence of the university in the territory, on the hill, spanning a hollow and manifesting like a long line built in the landscape. The Office Building for Buenos Aires, designed by Amancio Williams with his collaborators César Janello, Colette de Janello and Jorge Butler (1946) played a similar role. The building was proposed as a new way of urban generation, in a congruent way halfway between architecture and urbanism. “Give the city a piece whose only existence creates the dynamic force necessary to push it towards the real urban solution” 3 . The office building was a complete structural expression: four steel-structure volumes hung by means of steel tensors from a reinforced concrete structure, composed of four-column frames braced every 8 floors, with a superior system of three giant sculpturally carved trusses, from which the blocks hung, clearing the ground. The combination of long superblocks and towers was tested initially in the urban design project in Casa Amarilla 4 , by Antonio Bonet in collaboration with Amancio Williams, Horacio Caminos, Eduardo Sacriste, Ricardo Ribas, and Hilario Zalba (1943), located on one of the housing areas envisioned in the Plan Director for Buenos Aires, developed by Le Corbusier, Kurchan and Ferrari Hardoy 5 . Although in tune with the urban vision
held by Le Corbusier in the Buenos Aires Plan, the project presented other options in the design of the superblock. The adoption of an elaborate system of elevated streets, over which 5m-wide open longitudinal galleries inserted every three floors allowed access to a sequence of simple and duplex units, converting the conventional internal distribution corridors into exterior projecting platforms, facilitated by the inventive ‘fish scale” section of the blocks. In the case of the main block, the elevated streets comprised a total circulation equivalent to five Buenos Aires city blocks, thus evidencing its capacity to serve programmatically at a domestic scale but manifest itself formally on an urban scale, as components of the modern city. The projects for the hospitals of Curuzú Cuatiá, Esquina and Mburucuya, in the province of Corrientes, developed also by Amancio Williams between 1948 and 1953, consisted of a project operation based on a roofing system to cope with the subtropical climate and heavy rains 6 . A large high roof, consisting of shell-shaped vaults overlapped the development of the hospital’s spaces allowing a large ventilated shade, and the organization of many other public spaces, such as recreational places, children’s playgrounds and even service areas and parking. The structural unit for the construction of the roof was a shell vault inscribed in a 13m-side square, with a thickness of 4 cm, capable of withstanding extraordinary loads and supporting itself on a column through which it drained, even without the need for connection with the rest of the structure 7 . A subtle vault, which seemed to levitate, as an aerial infrastructure, necessary to shelter a world freely arranged underneath. “Argentina can claim, among other things, the production of the first megastructure project whose work begun”, 8 claimed Reyner Banham when referring to the Tucumán project. For him, the megastructure had some key elements, including complexity and a scalar condition. The projects thus developed the relationship between a structure that undertook the formal representative value and could organize the program in an unrestricted way, as a support for different, often changing functions, coming from an urban dynamic. Its infrastructural capacity derives from this condition.
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