On a city built from imported arguments that became, over time, entirely its own
Buenos Aires was built on the assumption that the best European architecture could be transplanted to the Río de la Plata, and the city has spent the subsequent century developing an argument about whether the transplantation worked.
Buenos Aires was built on the assumption that the best European architecture could be transplanted to the Río de la Plata, and the city has spent the subsequent century developing a complicated and largely successful argument about whether the transplantation worked. The Parisian boulevards are wider than Paris. The French classical buildings are more uniformly maintained. The covered shopping arcade — the Pasaje Roverano, the Galerías Pacífico, and specifically the Galería Güemes with its Art Nouveau staircase — are the Buenos Aires version of the argument that the Milanese and Parisians made with their own arcades and that the Buenos Aires commission, arriving twenty years later and with larger budgets, made more dramatically.
The El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookshop on Avenida Santa Fe is the one Buenos Aires building that every visitor is told about, and it is, genuinely, worth the description. The theatre-to-bookshop conversion preserves the 1919 stage, the painted ceiling, the boxes, and the original balconies — which now hold reading chairs rather than theatre seats — and fills them with books organised by the Spanish-language publishing system. The stage is now a café; the building now operates as what a grand theatre building can become when the theatre moves out and the books move in.
San Telmo on a Sunday is the Buenos Aires most commonly described in the foreign press, and it does what it does reliably: the antiques market on the Plaza Dorrego, the tango demonstrations, the neighbourhood breakfast in the Mercado de San Telmo. What the coverage usually omits is that San Telmo from Tuesday to Saturday is a neighbourhood operating at its own pace — the restaurants opening at nine in the evening, the galleries that nobody visits but that are genuinely good, the cobbled streets that the Sundays briefly commercialise but that the other days restore to their residential purpose.
The city reads itself through its bookshops and its libraries: the Biblioteca Nacional, with its collection of Argentine literature in the original manuscripts; the independent bookshops in Palermo Soho that carry the Argentine literary press more completely than anything available outside the country. Buenos Aires is a city that reads, and the places where reading happens — cafés, parks, the long afternoons on the Costanera Sur — are the correct places to understand what the city values and what it has built those values into.