For a couple of years I’ve been intending to take a photo of this house on Peru street, just around the corner from where I live. Just wished I had taken the photo before they threw up the For Rent sign. Those signs never come down…..oh, if you want to know, the rent: us$4,000.
As part of the recent restoration, the doors got a nice retouching.
It’s best when the morning sun hits the top of the building.
A little detail….
While browsing around a bookstore in San Telmo today I found a volume of photographs that fits perfectly with my City that Fades Away series: Arquitecturas ausentes: obras notables demolidas en la ciudad de buenos aires/Absent Architecture: Notable Works Demolished in the City of Buenos Aires.
As one can expect, there’s quite a lot of Buenos Aires that is no longer with us. This book of over 100 black-and-white photographs was produced by Marcelo Kohan and the Centro de Documentación de Arquitectura Latinoamericana (CEDODAL) here in Buenos Aires.
The cover image depicts the original Teatro Colón, then located just off of Plaza de Mayo.
Each photo in the book includes the address and a short description of the building. There are some really remarkable works, including many images I’ve never seen before. For any fan of Buenos Aires architecture, this is one for your collection.
Here’s a sample photo of Teatro Variedades that was located – where? – surprisingly, in front of Plaza de Constitución.
That’s nice, isn’t it?
Pick up a copy of the book to see the rest.
Borges felt that the calles, the streets, of Buenos Aires formed an integral part of his being, his soul.
Traveling on these strands of cobblestone and asphalt, you journey through the urban landscape that is Buenos Aires, passing from one sector of the city to another. Your introduction to this South American capital, this city on the Rio de la Plata, is in the back seat of a taxi or a remise, a hired car, likely a VW or a Peugeot, no Lincoln Town Cars for hire here. Perhaps you’re caught in the morning commute on the highway from the airport. Your driver, swerving onto the broad Av 9 de Julio that tore a swath through the middle of the city, reveals early morning glimpses of stylish buildings in various states of prosperity. Your first image of Buenos Aires is formed along these streets, as will be your last when you are whisked away several nights later.
You might never return, you may choose to visit regularly, or, like some of us, you may never leave, choosing to call Buenos Aires home. Regardless, the streets of Buenos Aires have become a part of you, someplace in the corner of your mind always will be here, cobblestones and those nearly hidden tracks of a tram that hasn’t run for decades, pathways offering access to discoveries.
This goes into the category of things you don’t miss if you didn’t ever know it was there.
For some time during my early visits to Parque Lezama I never noticed this wood sculpture near the park’s entrance. Then one day I did and took this photo in 2005. Wrapping around the base are carved the words Madre Tierra followed by the name of the artist. Unfortunately, my photo from then doesn’t show the full name of the sculptor.
Three years later, I was on one of my usual peregrinations around Parque Lezama and sensed something was missing. I walked around and found a stump in the ground. The wood sculpture had been cut down.
You can see the stump there in the foreground. Perhaps there was a reason for it. The top of the sculpture was cracked and maybe it was removed to be repaired. I certainly hope that it was not an accidental cutting, the grounds crew getting too carried away as they trimmed the plantings behind the sculpture and just went about whacking away.
This falls into the you never know what you’ll find on the streets of Buenos Aires category….a reel of magnetic tape, dated 1983 – 1984, tossed out onto the curb with the trash.
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We brought it home and added it to our growing collection of obsolete technology. What was the storage capacity of this thing…50 MB??
Wow, a month has gone since I’ve last posted on this blog…a writing project has been keeping me away…it’s hard to keep up with all my projects – writing on this and that, which all in some way are related to Buenos Aires. I promise to return to this blog with more posts and announcements about some of these mysterious writing projects that I occasionally refer to here.
Meanwhile, for fans of my 30 things to do in Buenos Aires list I want to remind people of a post from earlier this year about falling in love with Buenos Aires, a description of ten enjoyable ways to spend your days in Buenos Aires.
The block of Peru street between Av Caseros and Finochietto has a lot of appeal though parts are still in rather bad shape. Here’s a wonderful old house that is now an institute of some type…I forget off-hand….something related to vaccinations for farm animals…they have a web site which I need to find again…
Here’s another view of this block of Peru.
Yesterday’s post on Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project mentioned a surprise that came with the book. It’s not that unusual to find odd things in used books – old bookmarks, inscriptions of past owner’s names, slips of paper – but this was truly odd.
The surprise is that this book was once given by a man to a woman as a Valentine’s Day present.
Well, I’m not sure of the wisdom of giving a woman a heavy, scholarly tome for Valentine’s Day. Might not even an intellectual feminist prefer chocolates, flowers, or jewelry? I don’t know.
The guy who sent this was risky but thoughtful in some respects. It’s hard to say without knowing the girl but there’s this chance that she might have tossed him and this book onto the used pile.
There are various reasons why a book ends up on the used market…usually the owner sells the book, but sometimes other things just happen, leaving a mystery as to why and how this book and its forgotten contents ended up being discarded.
Anyway, the letter that comprised the Valentine which I found between the pages of the book was quite touching. And it does provide a great description of the book. I’m including it below, but am omitting the names of the recipient and the sender.
Dear **** – I thought you would like this book as much as I do. It’s fun to just flip through and read things at random, but the individual sections also point to pieces of a coherent vision regarding the growth of a dominant bourgeois sensibility and the development of Paris in the nineteenth century. It tends to assume an elaborate working knowledge of the history of Paris. Not having such background knowledge, I end up reading it as simultaneously history and critical history. I think you’ll be most interested in the sections on Hugo and Baron Haussman – but all the sections are interconnected. The other fun game to play with the individual notes is to try and determine whether Benjamin was on hashish when he wrote them. All in all, this is my favorite book in a long time, and I thought you would enjoy it as well. Let me know what you think.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Love,
***
For weeks I’ve been waiting for a shipment of books from the U.S. Finally, today, a notice arrived and that meant a trip down to Retiro and the international post office.
The most anticipated volume in this shipment, what I look forward to soaking in day after day, is the one thousand plus pages of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project
The entire book is simply snippets of Benjamin’s readings and his thoughts, an almost blog-like composition that Benjamin crafted while sitting in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
The work is a curious intersection of philosophy, urban planning, architecture, sociology, and literature.
Benjamin was fascinated by the arcades, passageways, of Paris and the ways those structures transformed Parisian society in the mid-1800s.
The Arcades Project – just like any blog – is an unfinished work. Begun in 1927, Benjamin still hadn’t completed the work by his death in 1940, a suicide at the French-Spanish border as he attempted to flee Nazi-occupied France. It’s not clear what Benjamin’s intended behind the many pages of notes that editors later comprised together to form The Arcades Project, possibly notes for another work or simply his own occupation with a variety of thoughts. Originally written in German and French, the English translation was not published until 1999.
Walter Benjamin was a great observer of urban culture. And in my own walks around Buenos Aires, I’m going to be lugging this volume (my edition is a 5 lb hardcover!) along some of my jaunts. It should make for fascinating reading and reflection while sipping coffee. I’m sure that it will not be the last book I will ever read. But, I probably could spend the remainder of my days perusing this volume.
Besides, my book shipment also included W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn
I bought this book used at a good price, the hardcover was no more expensive than a new paperback. But what I particularly like about buying used books is that they often come with an added surprise. And this one certainly did. I’ll blog tomorrow about that.
…this post continues yesterday’s odd encounters in the bookstores along Florida street…
Argentine writer César Aira never seems to struggle with the writer’s block, facing the blank page. After all, he has written more than 50 books. Despite his prolific output, I’m having a difficult time finding a wide range of his works in Spanish here in Buenos Aires. (I’m reminded of my long, desperate search last year for a particular set of books by the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano).
When I go to search for Aira I’m finding only 2 or 3 titles on the bookstore shelves. In one of the four hundred El Ateneo stores on Florida street, I pulled down a copy of Aira’s novel Embalse. I almost purchased it but as I was flipping through the pages I noticed that several pages were blank…page 62 had no ink on the page. Further examination revealed even more pages in the book that were blank…The book was published by Emecé, a fairly large publisher in Argentina. I would think that their quality control would be a lot better.
Then again, I partly wondered, considering Aira’s often eccentric style, if the blank pages were intentional. But I decided it was just a printing error. Yet, I couldn’t help to think of Italo Calvino’s wonderful story that plays with the concept of a reader buying a book with a printing error, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
