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 provided viewers with a greater chance of seeing the latest innovations in art and scientific thought. According to Glusberg, the coordination between theoretical thinking and artistic practice was a key factor in the achievement of social change.
During the military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía, the CAYC became a cultural home for the Fundación de Investigación Interdisciplinaria (Foundation for Interdisciplinary Research), a space that welcomed a group of dissident professors from the Facultad de Arquitectura y Ciencias Exactas de la Universidad de Buenos Aires after the military takeover of the university in what came to be known as “La Noche de los Bastones Largos” in June 1966.
In its early years the center organized a variety of activities with intellectuals that contributed to the circulation of ideas from different disciplines (analytical philosophy; mathematical logic; epistemological problems; psychology; semiotics; and linguistics) which had been excluded from official circles when the military took over the universities after the coup led by General Onganía in 1966.
This newsletter invites readers to attend “Semiótica de la arquitectura” (The Semiotics of Architecture), a seminar to be presented at the CAYC by Professor Armando Sercovich, a renowned specialist in the theories of signs and semiotic systems. After the course (GT-32, GT-107), the professor planned to make a presentation addressed specifically to architects. The bio included in the article mentions that he is the director in the field of semiotics at the center.
The center hoped that this event would draw attention to the possibilities that communication theories might provide for architecture, especially those that supported the CAYC’s program of activities and the creation of a poetics of its own with a regional identity.
