Arquitecto Clorindo Testa (1923-2013)
A creator between Apollo and Dionysus by Martín Marcos
Although born in Naples, Italy and arrived in Argentina at the age of five; Clorindo Testa was above all a man from Buenos Aires. A flaneur from Buenos Aires. Dazzling architect and brilliant artist, he was the product of a cultured and passionate city, from there he nurtured and extracted the main qualities of it.
Trained at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Buenos Aires, he always preferred a low profile and that his works speak for him. A brilliant student, he discovered modernity in architecture early on and adopted the master Le Corbusier as a reference and professional model to follow.
For Clorindo Testa painting, sculpture and architecture were part of a single creative and intellectual universe, where it is often difficult to determine the limits between one and the other. His abstract paintings and his expressive drawings of a sometimes intimate, dark and severe tone contrast with an architecture that always seems to want to spread optimism and joy. I feel that duality lived and stressed within Testa.
He returned to Europe in 1949 with a study scholarship for young graduates of the UBA and returned to Buenos Aires three years later as an architect and plastic artist.
In those days he exhibited his paintings in the Buenos Aires galleries with immediate success and at the age of 28 he won, together with other colleagues, his first architecture competition. The rationalist building of 1951 for the Argentine Chamber of Construction would be the beginning of a long and extensive professional career. Testa would become the Argentine architect who has won the most awards in architecture competitions throughout the 20th century. This reflects the enormous will and quality of his work, but also the empathy and support that his expressive and innovative proposals have had in the rest of the Argentine architectural community. Unlike other great Argentine architects, Testa has not reaped bitterness or enmity. His work, as complex and avant-garde, can be controversial but it is impossible to find colleagues who have had a dispute with him; and that is not a small thing in an environment as competitive and narcissistic as that of architecture. His humility, simplicity and generosity have always distinguished him as a true and elegant gentleman.
The first prizes for the works of the Civic Center of the Province of La Pampa and the National Library in Buenos Aires catapult it to the category of "form giver" and legitimize brutalist monumentalism as a possible exploratory territory for the economic and technological conditions of the Argentine developmentalist from the late 1950s. The one in La Pampa will be a set where an imposing 180-meter-long prismatic volume stands out in Chandigarh code, in which careful proportions, shadows, full, empty and a great plastic adjustment prevail, revealing a solid academic background. In the library, a forceful "party" frees the public space at the pedestrian level, concentrates the book deposits underground and makes the reading rooms grow, through a monumental concrete "tree", in an organic gesture of enormous morphological power. Also from that time are the urban model for the Catalinas Norte sector and the interventions in the Chacarita and Flores cemeteries, as a result of his work in the urban planning area of the Municipality of the City of Buenos Aires.
In 1964, at the age of 40, Testa will be summoned by the solvent and experienced SEPRA firm to participate in a private tender for the new headquarters of the Bank of London in the heart of the financial city of Buenos Aires. The resulting building for the corner of Reconquista and Bartolomé Miter is in my opinion the best work of Argentine architecture of the 20th century and one of the best in the modern world. The combination between the professional solvency and constructive rigor of the study of the architects Sánchez Elia, Peralta Ramos and Agostini, together with the avant-garde creativity of Clorindo Testa, produced a result of great particularity and exceptional beauty. An innovative proposal of a modernity certainly influenced by the last Le Corbusier, but endowed at the same time with a contextual quality within the dense typological fabric of the old quarter of the city that is remarkable and where I feel that the student surpasses the teacher. The corner is treated as a square, opening up the network of powerful concrete porches and giving a monumental entrance, through this colossal-height roofed transition space, to the internal and transparent box that encloses the functions of the bank. There the spatial organization generates a dynamic and suggestive experience of planes and trays suspended in space. Testa breaks with the image of a traditional bank and radically modernizes it, but at the same time produces a complex lesson in how to engage in a friendly and respectful dialogue with strong gestures and architectural forms with the pre-existing city.
Clorindo Testa was a cultured, multifaceted, non-dogmatic creator with a great craft and creative ability. His intervention works in the ancient colonial complex of the Recollect monks, in the 70s, gave rise to one of the most dynamic and beloved public cultural centers of the city, making the idea of "recycling" popular in these latitudes and installing an awareness of the architectural heritage and its potentialities.
Their homes will also be a reason for experimentation and a search for a singularly provocative poetics, from the colorful volumes and irregular geometry of the La Tumbona and CapoTesta houses on the Argentine coast, to the collective housing buildings such as the successful ensemble of Calle Castex 3335. There Testa works on the idea of patio balconies for the apartments and achieves a non-traumatic insertion of the tower typology within the compact fabric of the Buenos Aires block. Testa shows us all the time that the city always comes first, even in an architecture of formal gestures as powerful as his.
His passage through university teaching was fleeting, he had a chair at the University of Buenos Aires at the end of the 1950s but soon after he knew that this was not for him; He did not find there that pleasure and concentration that only his study, his atelier and the self-absorbed and playful dialogue with his works gave him. That was not the case for the UBA itself to name him "Doctor Honoris-Causa" and a few years later, in 2006, the city of Buenos Aires distinguished him as an "illustrious citizen."
Testa teaches through his works, doing more with less, and that in a country where resources are scarce is almost an ethical and moral commitment. A way of understanding the profession. His minimalist and inexpensive 1987 proposal for the headquarters of the Ibero-American Cooperation Institute-ICI in a narrow and tortuous basement with a minimal entrance on Florida Street in Buenos Aires is testimony to that way of understanding architecture as service and opportunity. Architecture can and should make life better, it seems to tell us. His joyful, but never frivolous, search for beauty has led him to experiment with forms, colors and textures of great expressiveness, but without neglecting or making concessions in the function and usefulness of the best architecture. His works always bear in mind the idea-force of a clear and forceful "party", but they also invite a more intimate and phenomenological journey through the details, the climates and the small winks that the creator leaves us throughout that rich promenade that proposes us to travel.
A great architect and successful artist has left who, from his particular point of view, has created a brilliant and unrepeatable work. It should serve, in the same way that he raised his relationship with Le Corbusier, as creative inspiration and not as a model to be copied. In it, reason and emotion coexist permanently. He has known how to take, with intelligence and measure, from Apollo and Dionysus the best that each one had to give him. There and in his love for the city resides the main value of his will.
Txt.- by Arq. Martín Marcos. Associate Professor FADU UBA
