Suburban lighthouse

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1994 by Bernardo Barbieri

This community centre is one of a series being built in the suburbs of Cordoba, and intended to provide a visual and social focus amid the unplanned chaos of the town.

Cordoba is the capital of the central state of Argentina and is one of the oldest living settlements in South America. Like most other cities in that continent, its ordered traditional heart is surrounded with a mass of chaotic development. To try to bring some sense of community and civic sense to these peripheral barrios, Cordoba has decided to build centres in the suburbs that will act both as the offices and hall of district councils, and as a focus for local cultural activities. As part of this decentralisation programme, the university (which has some 90 000 students) is to devolve much of its first-year teaching programme to the centres as a means of encouraging links between itself and local communities. Four of these centres have been built, and five more are to come. The first one to open, earlier this year, was the Arguello CPC.

As Secretary of the Desarrollo (development committee) of the Municipality of Cordoba, and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture of the university, Miguel Angel Roca was the key figure in the new urban policy and the natural choice for architect of some of the new centres. Like the ones he built at La Paz (AR October 1992), each is different and striking, intended to be a visual as well as social focus.

At Arguello, the parti is linear, with the two halves divided by a Plaza Institucional (a word that in Spanish carries none of the forbidding overtones of its English equivalent). The Plaza will perhaps one day get the defining creeper-clad, pergola-like trusses against the main avenues on either side of the centre, but at present it acts as a defined, slightly raised forecourt to both buildings. The entrance to the town-hall side is an open box turned at 45 degrees to the main axis to act as a welcoming portico. The deep blue box is topped with a pierced drum over which is a cylinder of glass blocks, which adds to the internal luminance of the porch in daytime, and forms a sort of urban lighthouse at night.

The porch gives on to a generous double-height space, mainly illuminated by clerestory light reflected off the yellow V-shaped roof, giving the whole space a subdued but vaguely sunny atmosphere. The sides of this luminous multiple use volume are lined with offices and committee rooms, and at the end, the council chamber is revealed through a glass screen -- a clearly democratic move in a country that has so often been ruled in secrecy. Externally, the cone of the chamber, pure and clad in white stone makes another appropriately striking landmark on the suburban scene.

Between the two dramatic moments in the plan is bale buff render, given scale by horizontal striations and small manipulations of the external wall plane to indicate the workings of the plan. The same external treatment is applied to the other half of the complex, which, lacking the colourful Euclidean high points of the town hall part, seems rather stolid in comparison.

But internally, the spaces are perhaps more powerful. Again, there is a central clerestory-lit tall space, this time covered with a light metal roof, the red vault of which warms the feeling of the volume. The sides of the vault are made of rooms that can be used for teaching and the space expands into a wide exhibition area that focuses on a bar. From here, stairs lead to the 350-seat auditorium that can be used for all kinds of performing arts.

The complex is a bold attempt to use architecture creatively in a social context. That the drama (some might call it melodrama) of the town-hall side is not echoed in the cultural centre is not necessarily a defect. The civic centre has its dramatic moments and perhaps the cultural side is appropriately downplayed as a relatively ordinary, easily assimilated part of the urban texture from which it takes its meaning.