This text expresses the disagreement of the young Argentinean generation regarding a note that Alejandro Bustillo (1889-1982) sent to the Professional Council of Architecture, in which he proposed a regulation of the profession. It poses a critical stand regarding the proposed plan of studies, which suggested using the Paris School of Fine Arts as a model, because Bustillo believed that architecture had become more of a scientific-industrial technique that an art form. Likewise, the members of the Centro de Estudiantes de Arquitectura [Architecture Students Center] rejected the work of Bustillo, who was considered a defender of an idea that is attached to a tradition that has not yet understood modern architecture, embodied by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, or Walter Gropius.

Boletín 2 del Centro de Estudiantes de Arquitectura [Bulletin No. 2 of the Architecture Students Center] had a Comité de Redacción [Writers Committee] made up of Juan Manuel Borthagaray (1928), Gerardo Clusellas, Carlos Méndez Mosquera (1930), and Pino Sívori. The bulletin’s design, carried out by Tomás Maldonado, marks one of the first signs of Milanese graphical influence on the Argentinean field. On the other hand, and clearly different from the first edition in its design, this piece was unequaled at the time.  

Tomás Maldonado is an intellectual, painter, and designer born in 1922, in Buenos Aires. In 1945 he was one of the founders of the painters’ movement known as the Asociación Arte Concreto — Invención[Concrete Art and Invention Association] and in 1954, he settled in Germany, where he worked as a professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm [School of Advanced Studies in Form, in Ulm], an institution that he later directed.  

The text, “Un arquitecto en Berlina” [An Architect on a Berlin], was disseminated in a leaflet included in Boletín 2 del Centro de Estudiantes de Arquitectura [Bulletin No. 2 of the Architecture Students Center] and was signed by the writing staff. It was created by Tomás Maldonado, Francisco Bullrich, and Carlos A. Méndez Mosquera.  

This source has been selected insofar as it brings to the fore the defense of modern architecture and the confrontation with the predominant line at the time, represented by the ideas and the works of Alejandro Bustillo.