Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played an important role in this process. The exhibitions shone a light on these exchanges, in which overviews of trends or individual artists provided an introduction to the innovations of international contemporary art and made Argentine and Latin American artists better known on the global scene.
Architecture and design were both basic components of the CAYC’s interdisciplinary approach from the very beginning. In its early years, the center became affiliated with the Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria (Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research), an organization that included a group of dissident professors from the Facultad de Arquitectura y Ciencias Exactas at the Universidad de Buenos Aires following the occupation of universities prompted by the coup d’état orchestrated by General Onganía in 1966. This connection to architecture left its mark on various aspects of the CAYC’s operations, such as the description of many of its initiatives as “projects;” the use of heliographic copies in its exhibitions (a technique used for copying building plans); the center’s collaboration with the industrial sector in exhibitions and contests; and the presence of several artist-architects among the members of the Grupo de los Trece, including Clorindo Testa, Luis Fernando Benedit, and Jacques Bedel.
In the mid-1970s—when the censorship and repression imposed by the military dictatorship (1976–83) made it impossible to produce any of the explicitly political works that had been so common since 1972—the CAYC organized activities such Contemporánea 76 (GT-636) and the Coloquios Latinoamericanos de Arquitectura (1976). These events contributed to the evolution of disciplines that were thought to have been ignored in Argentina in those days and that referred to the contemporary circumstances a little less directly.
Arquitectos de Buenos Aires presented a review of the most noteworthy professionals in the city. Some of the most interesting projects on display were the new works commissioned for the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, the naval school that later became known as the center for illegal detentions and torture during the dictatorship. As noted by Adrián Gorelik (“Materiales de la memoria,” Informe escaleno, Buenos Aires, 2014), the dormitory building at the school was an experiment in “systems” architecture. It was designed by the Lanari/Lanari/Púlice studio, which won the competition organized by the Argentinean Navy in 1972. The concept of “systems” entered the architectural discourse at the time; it was seen as a way to experiment with prefabricated buildings, which promised a solution to large-scale problems at an institutional or social level: schools, hospitals, and housing. Architecture with a strong political and social commitment was a mega-structural bet on the creation of “indefinite” urban networks that encouraged social creativity in a transgressive renewal of the basic functions of a city.
