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. In addition to the exhibitions, a program of different activities exposed attendees to the latest in art and scientific thinking. According to Glusberg, the coordination between theoretical thinking and artistic practice was an essential part of social change.
Architecture was a basic component of the CAYC’s interdisciplinary approach. In its early years, the center became affiliated with the Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria (Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research), an organization that welcomed a group of dissident professors from the Facultad de Arquitectura y Ciencias Exactas at the Universidad de Buenos Aires following the forced occupation of universities that took place after the coup d’état in 1966. That earlier affiliation left an indelible mark on various aspects of the CAYC’s operations, such as its approach to many of its initiatives as “projects;” the use of heliographic copies, a technique usually used for copying blueprints, in its exhibitions; the center’s collaboration with the industrial sector in exhibitions and contests; and the presence of several artist-architects among the founders of the Grupo de los Trece.
Eduardo Sacriste (1905–1999) was an architect and a university professor. Inspired by some of the ideas expressed by Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, he developed a vision of modern architecture that favored native construction materials and technologies, taking into account the climatic and environmental customs and conditions of each region. He put his vision into practice in public commissions and single-family homes, specifically in the Province of Tucumán in northeastern Argentina. He graduated in 1932, and moved to the United States in 1942, where he occasionally taught classes at MIT in Boston and at Tulane University in New Orleans. He was the dean of the School of Architecture at the Universidad de Tucumán from 1945 to 1960. As mentioned in this newsletter, he went to India twice. He was the head of the Department of Architecture at the Bengal Engineering College in Calcutta in 1956–57. Later, in 1965, he was appointed an advisor to the UNESCO, charged with analyzing the feasibility of postgraduate studies in Hindu architecture schools.
