[huge_it_slider id=”6″]
The Cultural Center Recoleta (in a beginning called Cultural Center City of Buenos Aires) is an exhibition center located in the neighborhood of Recoleta, in the City of Buenos Aires. It was declared a National Historic Landmark and is part of a tourist attractions and recreation pole, next to the Recoleta Cemetery and the Intendente Alvear Square, badly named Plaza Francia (This is where the Monument of France to Argentina rises, opposite to the National Museum of Fine Arts). It occupies the building of the old Viamonte General Asylum, and it is one of the most important cultural spaces of the city.
Convent of the Recollects
Cemetery, Church of Pilar and Asylum of Invalides, in 1867.
The site where the Cultural Center is located was originally donated to the Franciscan Recollect friars in 1716, and where the building is located, the cloister functioned. The plans of the work were designed by the German Jesuit architects Johann Kraus and Johann Wolff, while the design of the facade and the interior spaces are attributed to the Italian architect Andrea Bianchi.
The whole is one of the oldest buildings still standing in the city, since its construction was completed in 1732. With the arrival of the May Revolution and Argentina’s independence, the recollects born in Spain were moved to Catamarca due to their opposition to the First Board and the building changed its functions, since there Manuel Belgrano created a Drawing Academy, directed by Father Francisco de Paula Castañeda.
Asylum of Beggars and other uses
In 1822 the Governor Martín Rodríguez evicted the order of the Convent, transferring the remaining monks to the Church of San Francisco or the collection in Catamarca, and installed there the Asylum of Beggars. Everything was because of the Ecclesiastical Reform promoted by its minister Bernardino Rivadavia, by means of which it was expelled to the catholic orders and its buildings were used for public organisms: the complex was used like school of agriculture, botanical garden, prison and quarter.
In 1828, the troops of General Juan Lavalle were installed in the old Convent, giving rise to the rebellion in which the Governor Manuel Dorrego would be assassinated In 1834, on the initiative of Juan José Viamonte, a sector was transformed into the first Hospital of Clinics in the city and in an asylum for the mentally ill, and on October 17, 1858, Governor Valentín Alsina inaugurated the Asylum of Beggars there, then Asylum of Invalides, while street alms were forbidden.
Asylum of Elders “Governor Viamonte”
For ten years the asylum functioned under the direction of the Municipal Corporation of Buenos Aires, but before the critical budgetary situation, the administration of the institution was handed over to the order of the sisters of San Vicente de Paul. Recovering the character of the old convent, the nuns reordered the asylum and remained in charge of the now called Asylum of Elders, throughout the next century.The Charitable Society was the civil institution in charge of the financing and maintenance of the whole .
The area of ”La Recoleta”, as it was already called, was privileged by Torcuato de Alvear, first mayor of Buenos Aires (1880-1887), to carry out remodeling and beautification of the public space, and the asylum building was not the exception. Beginning with the extensions from the same year 1880, the pavilion of access, of Italianizante style, and the chapel of neogothic style were constructed, along with pavilions of a single plant, between 1881 and 1885. The works were financed with donations of porteños of high class and commissioned to the municipal architect Juan Antonio Buschiazzo, who designed all the buildings. Also Buschiazzo was the landscaper of the current Intendente Alvear Square, to which he endowed with an artificial lagoon and some false ruins that years later would be demolished; and he was the one who projected the current portico of the Recoleta Cemetery and the wall with sculptures that holds the terrace of the old asylum, saving the strong unevenness of the land. Thus, the area of Recoleta was transformed into the privileged one by Mayor Alvear, and it became one of the favorite walks of the Buenos Aires upper class, as documented by numerous photographs from the beginning of the 20th century.
Between 1893 and 1894 new expansions were carried out by Buschiazzo, while the asylum grew in its number of housed and added new dependencies: laundries, bakery, etc. After a brief economic crisis that affected the Municipality in the middle of the decade, in 1897. Now accompanied by his son Juan Carlos, the architect worked designing extensions for free, and this was maintained until in 1907 the Asylum was transferred to the National State as part of payment for the land where the Torcuato de Alvear Hospital would later be built, over the following decades a slow period of decline and deterioration occurred in Recoleta, which especially affected the Beggar Asylum, which in 1944 to be called Asylum of Elders “General Viamonte”. It came to have capacity for 800 people (of both sexes), with the condition that they had neither relatives nor means to subsist. They were attended by 341 employees, distributed in 3 shifts and between the facilities there were 17 dining rooms, a modern kitchen, infirmary, library and heated rooms.
However, the 1960s meant a turning point for the area, since on the one hand the first restaurant of what would become a gastronomic pole was installed, in charge of the then recognized chef Gato Dumas, and on the other the Plaza Francia was the place chosen by Buenos Aires youth to spend their free time and sell handicrafts, as hippie movement and rock were installed as fashion. On the wall of the Asylum the crafts fair was installed, and in the ravines of the square some of the fathers of the Argentine rock met, like Pappo, Claudio Gabis, Miguel Abuelo, Moris and the mythical Tanguito among others.
While Plaza Francia once again consolidated itself as a meeting place for new sectors of society, younger and less aristocratic than those who had previously privileged Recoleta, the old man’s asylum continued its process of deterioration, as documented by a photographic series of 1969, made by Diana Frey.
Recoleta Cultural Center
The second major remodeling would happen almost a century later, in 1979. Argentina was governed by a military dictatorship and the de facto mayor Osvaldo Cacciatore promoted a pretentious project to transform the old asylum into the new City of Buenos Aires Cultural Center, where they would settle in a unique venue: the Museum of Cinema, the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Plastic Arts, as well as housing part of the collection of the Museum of Hispanic-American Art.
The work was designed by the prestigious architects and plastic artists Clorindo Testa, Jacques Bedel and Luis Benedit, while the occupants of the asylum were moved to the town of Ituzaingó and Rawson Asylum. Although Cacciatore proposed keeping the classical style of the old buildings in the reforms, the architects chose a completely contemporary language for their work, installing metal stairs next to the old vaulted corridors and demolishing several of the old pavilions designed by Buschiazzo a hundred years ago.
The Cultural Center was inaugurated in December 1980, and it was during the direction of Osvaldo Giesso (1983-1989), already again in democracy, that it began to grow to fully develop, and changing its name to “Recoleta Cultural Center” from 1990. Inside the CCR operates the Participatory Science Museum “Prohibido no tocar”, a place specially designed for young people and children where the interactive experience brings them closer to physical phenomena.
In one sector of the building, ceded by the Municipality of Buenos Aires when returning to democracy in 1983, the offices of the United Nations and the Organization of American States in Argentina operate.
In 2001 a new and spacious space was inaugurated, the Villa Villa Room, built with $ 250,000 donated by the theater group De la Guarda, who had debuted in 1995 at the same Recoleta Cultural Center. In 2005, Clorindo Testa returned to the CCR to project a remodeling in the framework of its 25th Anniversary. Thus, during the following years the entrance hall was renovated, the exhibition halls were remodeled and restored. In 2010, for the 30th Anniversary of the cultural center, the El Aleph Auditorium, which occupies the building of the old chapel, was restored.
Present
With its main access through the same building that functioned as the Access Pavilion and headquarters of the Directorate and General Administration of the Asylum for the Elderly, in Junín Street 1930, the Recoleta Cultural Center is structured with the classic scheme of courtyards that was used for the convents and houses in general in colonial times. Thus, from the entrance hall depart the two main circulations of the set. The first one is outdoors and it was called Patio del Tilo because of the old tree that stars it. On its right side a series of buildings interspersed with open patios that connect it with the terrace facing Plaza Francia and the river. In a very renovated pavilion that belonged to the asylum they work: the Cronopios Room, the J and C Rooms, and on the top floor the Music Direction and the Participatory Science Museum. Following the Patio del Tilo you will reach the El Aleph Auditorium, occupying the old neo-Gothic chapel, and finally a contemporary building that houses staff quarters. The façade of one of the demolished pavilions was still standing, where a series of commemorative bronze plaques of high-class porteños who donated funds for the construction of the asylum are exhibited, between 1884 and 1897. It was also chosen to keep standing one of the galleries of the first floor that runs through the Patio del Tilo over columns, and connects the upper floor of the auditorium and the Cronopios Room with the rooms located in the opposite building. This elevated gallery ends in a curious clock that adorns a glass walkway, the so-called Clock Bridge, where the cultural center ends and passes to the sector belonging to Buenos Aires Design and the Buenos Aires Auditorium, crossed by another catwalk designed by Testa with structure metal, referring to the previous surviving asylum footbridges.
The second main circulation of the Recoleta Cultural Center also part of the access hall from Junín Street through a metal structure and a ramp, but goes directly to the old Jesuit buildings that were kept standing, sharing the dividing wall of the Cemetery. It is an extensive corridor with vaulted ceilings and painted white as was used in colonial times, on which happens a number of longitudinal galleries to the right, and a set of four courtyards to the left, which allow air access and natural light, and are bordered by rooms transverse to the main hall. Patio de los Naranjos, de la Fuente, del Aljibe and del Tanque, each one has a characteristic that distinguishes it, although they are identical in their orthogonal form and the pavilions around them that house exhibition halls, a local of artistic publications and a small cafe. From the Patio de la Fuente opens a glazed volume that connects the ground floor with the upper floor, where are the Directorate, the Association of Friends, the classrooms for courses, the library, the video library, the micro-cinema, the personnel sectors .
See location at Google Maps
