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 fundamental components of the CAYC’s interdisciplinary approach from the very beginning. In its early years, the center was 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 Argentinean universities prompted by the coup d’état orchestrated by General Onganía (1966). All those experiences left their 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 reproduction technique usually used for plans of all kinds); 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 and Luis Fernando Benedit.
In his visual art, which was always inspired by his work as a noted architect and urbanist, Testa addressed the subject of living conditions in a modern city. He regularly took part in international competitions, which challenged him to come up with solutions for different places and conditions, even when such plans never came to fruition. One of those projects was the draft design for the Regional Hospital on the Ivory Coast. Later issues of the newsletter provide details of those plans (GT-633; doc. no. 1477202) and of the natural surroundings where the building was to be constructed (GT-634; doc. no. 1477203).
After Glusberg was appointed director of the CICA (Comité Internacional de Críticos de Arquitectura), in 1978, the CAYC renewed its interest in architecture, a trend that was consolidated in the mid-1980s. When democracy returned to Argentina in 1985, the first Bienal Internacional de Arquitectura was organized in Buenos Aires, an event that is still presented to this day. In keeping with its institutional style, the center promoted the integration by inviting high profile international guests, such as the architects Norman Foster, Richard Meier, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, and Richard Rogers.
