Buenos Aires's design neighbourhood at the hour it knows itself
Palermo Soho on a Saturday afternoon is the Buenos Aires that functions as its own justification — a neighbourhood where the afternoon has been taken seriously as a unit of time worth designing around.
Palermo Soho on a Saturday afternoon is the Buenos Aires that functions as its own justification — a neighbourhood where the afternoon has been taken seriously as a unit of time worth designing around. The jacaranda and gomero trees that Buenos Aires planted systematically across Palermo at the beginning of the 20th century form a canopy over the streets. In November the jacaranda flowers purple; at other times of year the trees provide shade and the particular filtered light of a city that chose its street planting carefully and waited for it to grow.
The architecture is early 20th-century residential — Italianate and French Eclectic houses of two and three storeys that were converted to retail ground floors when the neighbourhood changed function. The conversion was done gradually and without plan: a clothing designer moved into a house, then another designer, then the café that serves the designers. The result is the specific aesthetics of Palermo Soho — high ceilings visible through street-level windows, the interior courtyard accessible from the street, the contrast between the old building envelope and the contemporary retail inside it.
The ceramic and leather goods are the most locally specific purchases. Argentine leather — from the cattle country south and west of the city — has a weight and quality specific to the source. The ceramics are the work of individual potters operating out of the converted houses, and the price reflects production at a scale that makes the work consistent with its quality. Neither of these statements is true of the tourist-facing shops on Florida Street in the centre; they are true of the shops on Thames and Malabia and the blocks between them.
The afternoon in Palermo Soho concludes, if it concludes at all, with coffee at one of the café terraces around Plaza Serrano. The Argentine cortado is served with soda water and a small medialunas — the croissant shaped into a half-moon, smaller and softer than its French equivalent. Order and stay. The square continues its afternoon without reference to the time, which is a civic disposition that Buenos Aires cultivates and that the visitor usually interprets as a form of permission.