1963-1971, the Colegio Mayor Argentino Nuestra Señora de Luján Horacio Baliero and Carmen Córdova’s View from the Margins

Abstract

In September 1963, a competition was held for the Colegio Mayor Argentino Nuestra Señora de Luján, the purpose of which was to accommodate Argentine students at the Ciudad Universitaria in Madrid. The winning project was by the Buenos Aires architects, who at that time were a married couple, Horacio Baliero and Carmen Córdova. Their proposal, like the rest of those presented, all from Argentina, was drawn from a few photographs and a planimetry of the site and was born from their adaptation to the layout of the place. However, it was during the second stage of the project and their stay in the Iberian Peninsula, when Baliero and Córdova rediscovered the place and its nature in its physical, social and cultural dimension. Using the written legacy that Baliero published decades later under the title “Architecture: the view from the margin”, we propose to reflect on an approach to the place through the journey experienced by architects, as a crossroads of tangible and intangible perceptions, variable and invariable, illusory and real, above a visual or drawn approximation. From this prism, we will show how much of the architects’ intuition and craft was able to successfully replace direct experience of the place and how much was modified after an initial idealized and intellectualized vision.