Buenos Aires domes: The most sought after, the ones that were lost and the iconic rooftops of the city
Rooftops, ateliers, viewing points, artistic interventions, mapping projections, wine tastings, theatres, coworking spaces and party venues have taken over the city's new "instagrammable" icons: the notable domes and tops of Buenos Aires.
Local and foreign tourists, digital content creators, photographers and tour guides try –with varying success– to access the architectural peaks of the Queen of the Silver River.
The most sought-after domes? The restored one of the Confitería del Molino , the three of the Bencich Towers , separated by the Diagonal Norte, the almost impregnable double dome of the National Congress , the half-naked viewing point of the Güemes Gallery , the glass and metal observatory of Alsina 1762 (almost Entre Ríos Avenue), –a whim of the mathematician Claro Cornelio Dassen–, the lighthouse of the Barolo Gallery or the twin domes of La Inmobiliaria , a rental house and premises that Antonio Devoto inaugurated expressly on May 25, 1910, commemorating the first Centenary of the May Revolution.
Not all of them are actually domes, as they are known in English, vaults or calottes. There are other geometric shapes: pyramidal, pointed, on columns (temple style), blind, with a mansard roof –which includes windows as a sine qua non condition–, or simply monumental finishes with sculptural groups, obelisks or viewing points surrounded by cresting.
Until 1996, thanks to the reform that established its full autonomy, the capital of Argentina was called in the official documents “City of the Trinity and Port of Santa María del Buen Ayre” and was established on a plain crossed by streams or ditches with numerous estuaries or marshes. There was no good wood for construction, logging predominated, but its thin trunk was only useful for firewood and cabinetmaking, not for building. Nor did the soil provide rocks to stack and generate permanent architecture. Construction was done with adobe, bricks and “musleras” tiles – made on the thighs of the Indians of the religious missions – but there are no vestiges of pre-Columbian constructions in the city and its surroundings.
The first domes in Buenos Aires were, naturally, the tops of churches , as shown by the first paintings that became engravings that portrayed the vertical growth of Juan de Garay's laborious and precarious creation.
On the dividing wall between the Recoleta cemetery administration and the Church of Pilar, there is a reproduction of a painting by one of the first portrait painters in the city, called Ferdinando Brambila , born in Fara Gera d'Adda, in Lombardy, educated at the Brera Academy, who later Castilianized his name for his long service to the Spanish crown. Brambila visited our coasts as a painter for the Scientific Expedition of Alessandro Malaspina, which took place between 1791 and 1794, and included America, Asia and Oceania. There, embellished with artistic license, appear the temples of San Pedro Telmo, San Ignacio, San Francisco, the Cathedral and Pilar.
That was the panorama in Buenos Aires at the end of the 18th century, but the construction materials were so precarious that the dome of the cathedral collapsed three times, in an area of low seismic activity such as the Río de la Plata basin.
The statistics of the 1869 census confirm the epic of the Generation of '80 and the foreign commercial bourgeoisie that came to make America. They raised the status of Buenos Aires from a village to a domed metropolis. In Buenos Aires alone there were 33 architects, 121 engineers, 33 cabinetmakers, 1 plasterer, 1 locksmith, 5 builders, 84 foremen, 3,258 bricklayers, 14 brick makers, 1,301 blacksmiths, 72 sculptors, 104 marble workers, 79 stone cutters, 2 plumbers, 24 chair makers, 4 roofers, 27 plasterers and 1 zinc worker.
To put this into professional context, the figures reveal that there were 32 shoe-shiners (one less than architects, who, in turn, were 5 less than corn-growers), there were 97 more Buenos Aires laundresses than bricklayers, there were as many comb-makers as brick-makers, and prostitutes were 64 people ahead of the number of engineers.
This is how the city was built, a true feat of immigrants and thanks to the metal structures of Vasena, the columns of the Zamboni workshop and the reinforced concrete beams and slabs of the Argentine Portland Cement Company.
Many notable domes and tops have been lost in a variety of circumstances: openings or widening of avenues, fires, bombings, neglect or the inability of their owners to maintain them in the face of major deterioration. Nothing can be done on the buildings demolished to the foundations, but perhaps, one day, state and private micro-financing actions – as is happening in other cities around the world – can recover these domes.
In 2018, the Buenos Aires City government proved that it was possible, by giving new life to the art nouveau dome of the Hotel Chile on Avenida de Mayo and Santiago de Estero, and the remade pyramidal top of one of Saint's rental building towers on 2630 Perón Street, in 2019, within the Once Pedestrian Plan.
The National Congress has restored, recreated with technology applied to restoration, the two sculptural groups made by Lola Mora flanking the main entrance and the winged lions that guarded the conical dome of the Confitería del Molino.
Trying to classify them without graphs, sections and arrows is very complex, but it is a task that was undertaken by the architect Néstor J. Zakim in his book Cúpulas, remates y miradores de Buenos Aires (2015), published by the General Directorate of Heritage and the Historical Institute, and by the journalists Federico and Marlú Kirbus in their posthumous work Cúpulas de Buenos Aires, las más bellas alturas porteñas (Domes of Buenos Aires, the most beautiful heights in Buenos Aires) , where they review 125 of this type of construction.
Of course, these are not all. The list would be endless, and every week new photos appear in Facebook groups, where a legion of researchers –professional or amateur– are collaboratively assembling the architectural memory of the former Paris of South America.
For many, the first rooftop in Buenos Aires was the one at the Alvear Palace Hotel, built in 1932, with its tables on the terrace and the Río de la Plata in all its splendor. However, photographic evidence shows two other pioneers, both of which have disappeared: the one at the Hotel Majestic building, on Santiago del Estero and Avenida de Mayo, from 1909, and the terrace of the Gath & Chaves building, on Florida and Perón, from 1912.
The old building of the Buenos Aires City Hall, designed by Juan Antonio Buschiazzo and directed between 1891 and 1902 by Juan Cagnoni, on Bolívar 1, lost its characteristic arch in an accident caused by welding. The edition of La Nación on Wednesday, March 3, 1941, records the name of the unfortunate worker who lost the arch.
On the corner of Av. de Mayo and Salta, civil engineers C. Fernández Poblet and Alejandro de Ortúzar designed the Gran Hotel Castilla and the Avenida theatre in 1908. Its façade was lost by 45% after the fire at the Banco de Intercambio Regional (which occupied the old hotel). The fire that occurred on 3 April 1979 caused the loss of three floors, a sculptural crown and a mansard roof.
Behind the hotel's ruined corner, there was a small temple that no longer exists. It was the top of Yrigoyen 1208, a beautiful building with Italianate features that still survives, but its head is missing.
Another auction, crossing Salta, a truncated slate pyramid could be seen crowning the current Cassará Foundation.
Diagonally, the building by the Trieste architect Gerónimo Agostini serves as a magnificent example of what is known in architecture as a lantern: a tube-shaped element, arranged as a top on a dome, which, through openings, allows lighting and ventilation of the interior space of the building. The lantern of the former Hotel Paris joins the catalogue of lost tops on standing buildings. The building was consolidated up to the terraces by the last intervention of the Urban Regeneration Department of the City Government in 2018. The five tops of the building – three small blind domes with lightning rods and the two main ones – were not included in the master plan.
The architect Juan Augusto Plou did not use his first name when signing his works and left many corners of Buenos Aires with his academic imprint, the result of his training in France. The large rental house of Rodríguez Peña and Sarmiento is one more in his vast catalogue. All the finishing touches, the central one and the smaller ones, were ironed.
A true selection of architects participated in the erection of three large buildings in the Bajo: the Nicolás Mihanovich Navigation Company, by the Croatian architect Joseph Markovich, the Palace Hotel, by the Neapolitan nobleman Carlo Morra, Marquis of Monterochetta, and the National Mortgage Bank, by the German architect Hans Altgelt, and his Argentine cousin, Carlos Altgelt.
The headquarters of the shipping company lost much of the ornamentation of the top that holds the globe and the entire dome with mansard roof, and the figure of a galleon on scale that was above the exit of 25 de Mayo and Perón.
At the hotel, also commissioned by Nicolas Mihanovich, a succession of stepped turrets disappeared. Only one remains and it has been boarded up with metal sheets for years.
Next, the old bank, now the headquarters of the National Electoral Chamber, suffered the destruction of a large central turret with a balcony, mansard roof and clock.
In Ayacucho and Paraguay, there is an impressive French academic building by the Gallic architect Georges Delattre, which has lost the entire cap and conical top of the dome, which was, infrequently, oval-based.
Delattre arrived in Buenos Aires with his colleague Louis Faure Dujarric, as part of the team of Joseph Bouvard, the professional hired to draw 32 diagonals in Buenos Aires.
The creation of the German architect Alfred Zucker for Ernesto Tornquist in Plaza San Martín is now undergoing a complete refurbishment, after years of inactivity. Although it was foreseeable that it would have lost its cresting and the ornamentation of its cornices, it is surprising to find old photos that show a central body, with seven levels, with windows and an open temple-shaped top, supported by columns. Looking at aerial photos, it can be inferred that it was demolished between 1929 and 1937.
This corner pharmacy building is still standing at Paso and Avenida Córdoba, but the damage it suffered is enormous: the dome's cap, an iron dragonfly and all the cherub mouldings have disappeared. The architect Virginio Colombo's free-spirited design was limitless, but no traces have remained. Even several windows have been bricked up. Not even the exquisite modernist door has survived completely.
Bernardo Luis Fontan –without an accent– is a bit of a mystery for the small community of researchers of Buenos Aires architecture. It has not yet been discovered where he was born and where he trained. When the Sociedad Central de Arquitectos turned 120 years old, it posthumously named him as an honorary member, along with other professionals who had not studied in Argentina nor had their degree validated at the Faculty of Architecture, but who earned recognition for their built work. The rental house with premises on the corner of Billinghurst and Av. Rivadavia is another example of a headless building standing.
The building designed by architect Gioja, at Av. Caseros 962, was built in two stages (first one, and then, next door, another identical one). Both parts have lost their two quadrilateral domes with mansard roofs and finished with a crested viewing point. Fortunately, the details of large bee figures on the entrance doors have been preserved.
Arístides, Sócrates and Alfredo Ceci formed one of the first mega construction companies in Buenos Aires. They built small palaces, the Conciliar Seminary of Devoto, rental houses, and small hotels for designers of the stature of the aforementioned Le Monnier and Alfred Massué, Pedro Coni, Lanús and Hary, Carl Nordmann and the Devoto, Urquiza, Roca and Ambrosetti families, as well as many works commissioned by the Argentine Catholic Church.
By 1965, the domes were no longer in available aerial views.
In Vélez Sarsfield e Iriarte (Barracas), Mrs. Antonia Iraola, widow of Leonardo Pereyra, and her six children promoted in 1904 the construction of a chapel dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, through the architect Rómulo Ayerza, part of the family clan, in the image and likeness of a church in France. In 1913, a cyclone tore off the arch, which, according to various sources, was made of wood and consisted of three levels of stairs, a lantern and a cross at the top. It was never rebuilt.
This great artist Saamer Fouad Makarius, born in Cairo in 1924 and died in Buenos Aires, a city where he lived from 1953, left us this image of the pointed dome of the building on the corner of Las Heras and Sánchez de Bustamante Avenues (in front of Cemic), on the ground floor of which the Link pharmacy operated for many years. A great document in an area where old photos are not abundant.
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