biggeri

Immigrations: context 

The economic and demographic expansion in the 1880s in Argentina, building the Nation.

Immigration is one of the founding myths of Argentina and constitutes the cultural feature part of the imagination and identity of a society that indissolubly links it to its golden age. In this period, the immigrant was conceived as a modernizing figure and a settler of the desert, while the channeling of agricultural colonization was considered one of the essential resources to civilize the country. The great flow of foreigners combined with their different group backgrounds had an impact on the early modernization process of the Nation. Both the great diversity, and the high percentage in relation to its population, were decisive in the imaginary configuration of building the Nation. The 1895 national census demonstrated that 25% of the population was immigrant, a percentage that 40 years later would rise to 27% in twice the population.

After a period of political consensus between Buenos Aires and the rest of the provinces, the recently unified Argentina was in a process of a great economic development based on an agro-export model that would include the figure of the migrant as a protagonist in the productive process. Thus the pro-migrant rhetoric was manifested in policies aimed at encouraging the expansion of foreign flows and the integration of immigrants into the new country’s life: The Law 817 on “Immigration and Colonization” took up ideals that conceived the immigrant as an agent of civilization that would transplant to the Argentine land their knowledge and their industrial and methodical habits. Consequently, a dense network of immigration agents was created in Europe, subsidized tickets were issued to diversify the flow and different devices were set up within the State, such as the inauguration of the Placement Office and the Immigrants Hotel.  

The urban effect

Migrations and the metropolitan dwelling 

In the early beginnings, the capital city of Buenos Aires had been imagined as a limited, bureaucratic and commercial organism, head of an agricultural and livestock production territory, covered by an extensive network of small towns where the different migratory groups would mobilize and settle. In contrast to the vision of the territorial occupation, the largest percentage of immigrants was concentrated in the urban area and therefore a modernization process was established at different levels of the construction of the metropolitan habitat. Buenos Aires and the cities of the coastal-pampas region received and sheltered most of the foreigners that arrived to the coasts. By then, the urban areas of Argentina had been transformed into a cosmopolitan world where numerous languages were spoken, different religions were professed and an intense sociability characterized by ethnic meanings was emerged.

In Buenos Aires, the neighborhoods located south of the city's nerve centre (formed by the government institutions) and bordered by the Riachuelo River were the main destination of the newcomers. These quarters were abandoned by the dominant classes in response to an epidemic at the end of the 19th century and the closeness to the port and the emerging factories turned them into an opportunity of occupation for the foreigners. An occupation that would be  constant generator of new spatialities, transcending the projected modern city and coexisting with the construction of progress, the -ideal city- that the elites had imagined.

These spatialities would be manifested both in the field of housing and work, as well as in the mutual associations and ethnic press groups, which grew with the increase and diversity of the immigration flow. Although these places would be transcendental in the composition of immigrant communities and in the definition of the borders between the different cultural identities, were another component of the city's Babelian environment, which encouraged everyone to be part of the migratory experience within the urban atmosphere.

Shacks in the neighborhoods against the Riachuelo River, southern limit of Buenos Aires (1877) - Florida St., downtown Buenos Aires (1900)

Source: Archivo General de la Nación

Collective narratives 

Marginal housing conditions

In the housing field, the generation of the conventillos (tenements) was the main manifestation of popular dwelling, which did not require any type of intervention by specialists, and would be established as the narrative that had no place in the theoretical system of the discipline. Temporary settlements were also built and, in a second instance, an extensive system of self-built houses due to the electrification of transport networks that extended the urban grid. These housing conditions were the product of a conscious lack of interest in the housing field and real estate speculation, where their marginality grew along with the development of the country.

The composition of the conventillos was characterized by a succession of overcrowded rooms for rental purposes. These lined up rooms were arranged towards an open space of the smallest possible dimensions, provided with limited bathrooms and laundry facilities. The construction materials used were wooden boards and strips, zinc sheets and any other type of recycled elements: the material narrative that exposed the public disinterest and the ephemeral nature of these housing conditions. Moreover, these materials contrasted with those used in the new institutional buildings, benefited from the resources provided in the heigh of the material revolution of the early 20th century.  

Shacks closed to the Port of Buenos Aires (1890) - Beggars settlement in Buenos Aires (1900)

Source: Archivo General de la Nación

In the open spaces of these housing conditions, euphemistically called patios (courtyards) not referenced from an architectural typology, but understood as the residual place among the profitable units of each set, is where took place the popular collective, the culture of invisibles. In conjunction with different workplaces, factories and the port, it will be the space for expression and conflict in the isolated world of migrants, and the diversity of its actors were the generators of different political and artistic expressions, stories, images: collective narratives.  

Conventillo of Piedras St. 1268 (1902) - Conventillo (1903)

Source: Archivo General de la Nación

The popular housing

The strikes and the State devices

The collective narratives were those that at the junction with the progressive vision, entered into conflict and revealed in different organisms and episodes, generating new spatialities within urban life. From the creation of the Socialist and Anarchist Party, the Cooperative “El Hogar Obrero”, the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina, to different attempts and popular strikes. In a dialectic of reactionary narratives, the State sanctions the Residence Law (1902) and the Social Defense Law (1910), in response to regulate and limit the undesirable effects of the immigration flow, social conflicts, and the presence of refugees and exiles.

Therefore, one of the most trascendental episodes in the subsequent development of the new housing schemes was La Huelga de los Inquilinos (the Tenants' Strike) in 1907, a long process led by the popular sectors in response to the policies that affected their habitat, particularly reflected in the low hygienic conditions.  The disproportionate rate increase on the rental contracts was the trigger for the strike, which opened up a border that had systematically fragmented two imaginaries: the imaginary of progress over the popular migratory imaginary, the invisible imaginary. The process led by children and women in possession of brooms (to "sweep away the injustices of that world") generated the collective conception of own voice, the beginning of a debate on popular housing between different leading organizations of the country and the creation of new devices within the State.  

La Huelga de los Inquilinos - “Conventillo Revolucionario” Ituzaingo St. 279, Buenos Aires

Source: Caras y Caretas - Archivo General de la Nación   

After these debates, and several legislative attempts that tried to integrate different housing experiences of the popular classes, finally emerged in 1915 the law 9.677 which integrated a "National Commission of Cheap Houses" (Comisión Nacional de Casas Baratas: CNCB). This Commission should promote the construction of new housing, experimenting and demonstrating the possible solutions. In the following years, they developed different projects for workers, building various collective houses and complete neighborhoods within the expansive urban grid. Thus "popular architecture" came to be formalized, materializing the intervention of the State and an image of the habitat that simultaneously instrumented the propaganda both on a national and international scale: a legitimate and official narrative that redefined one of the borders within the architectural imaginary. 

• Pues, hombre, me he venido a este inquilinato, porque aquí nunca se habla de huelgas ni otras  macanas.

• ¿Que dice? ¡No crea que todas son flores! A lo mejor, el encargado le pide el desalojo, como le pasó al último inquilino de la pieza..

• Well, man, I've come to this tenement, because here nobody talks about strikes or others foolishness.

• What are you saying? Don't think everything is fine! Maybe the landlord will ask you to leave, like he did with the last tenant of the room.

Caricature of “The Conventillos issue” 

Caras y Caretas Magazine, Buenos Aires, September 28, 1907

Source: Hemeroteca Digital — Biblioteca Nacional de España

Progress Report on Workers' Housing in Latin America  : Conventillos — Valentin Alsina Collective House

Bulletins of the Pan American Union 1924

Source: Google Books   

CNCB, Valentin Alsina Collective House

Monthly Magazine, Official Organ of the National Association of Architects N49, Havana, August 1937: " Economic Houses" 

Fuente: Internet Archive — archive.orgCollective Houses

Architectural Imaginaries

The term of the National Commission of Cheap Houses was given from its formation in 1915 until 1943 when it was dissolved. According to Jorge Francisco Liernur, director of the American Art and Aesthetic Research Institute -Mario J. Buschiazzo - at the time of the publication of the article "Buenos Aires: the strategy of the self-built house", the capacity to respond to the country's necessities was not reflected in the amount of houses built, on the contrary, its objective was established in one of the first publications of the Commission, which proposed "to guide popular education towards the cult of the home, to convince the worker that his house is the prolongation of the spirit, to teach the worker that such a man, such a dwelling, to show him how even the clumsy individual prefers a clean, orderly, and happy house, because in it life is good, because of the sun and the air, and it is beautiful because of the soul and the heart of the one who inhabits it. Such is the action that needs to be developed and in which the school, the book and the film will cooperate.” 

In the official bulletins published by the CNCB under the name of -La Habitación Popular-, it stated that the Commission was "convinced that it is necessary to bring to the people of the Republic the integral knowledge of what the house-room really and spiritually means for their well-being and progress”. Therefore, through the publication of the bulletins, they presented the law that gave rise to the Commission and its political-social commitment, and developed the themes that they considered crucial in relation to housing: hygiene, urban planning, "public culture". They also presented administrative balances and accounts of their projects, proposed different models of buildings, as well as models of houses and technical data of personalized construction, and announced national and international news, the next Pan American Congresses of popular housing. Its objective was to configure an architectural imaginary capable of homogenizing a unique movement, and to do so it used these two narrative tools, the mentioned publications and the construction of the Collective Houses.  

Different were the models of the Collective Houses influenced by the architectural movements during the Commission's term. While each project attended to issues related to its immediate context and the size of the assigned plot of land, they all had certain characteristic elements in common. The provision of basic services to each of the housing units, as a response to the public health debates of the late 19th century, and the inclusion of interaction spaces within the building. Thus the materialization of the patios and semi-covered common areas, the formalization of sociability in the housing units predestined for the working class. Five projects of collective houses were carried out in interrupted periods, all of them located in the southern neighborhoods of Buenos Aires: Valentin Alsina (1919), Bernardino Rivadavia (1922), América (1937), Patricios (1937), Martín Rodriguez (1943).  

Bulletin of the National Commission of Cheap Houses "La Habitación Popular" - Valentin Alsina Collective Housing, published in "La Casa-Habitación" (CNCB Bulletin) Nº1, July 1934

• Source: U.B.A.- Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo. Centro de Documentación - Biblioteca "Prof. Arq. Manuel Ignacio Net"Valentin Alsina Collective House (1919)

Location: Parque Patricios, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Project: Arch. Pasman, Raúl

• Casa Colectiva América (1937)

Location San Telmo, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Project: Arch. Pirovano, Estanislao  

Redrawings of the subject Design (Architecture) in the Tony Diaz Chair, FAU - UNBA - 1985

Source: Archivo de imágenes digitales de la Facultad de Arquitectura Diseño y Urbanismo de la Universidad de Buenos Aires.Migrating in Liquid Modernity

Borders as an opportunity for integration

The migratory act from an epistemological perspective can be conceived as the individual act in a state of movement capable of modifying courses and borders, generating different types of spatialities and being able to integrate diverse collectives in this process. Therefore, making a conceptualization of the borders, the integration of these collectives and their respective spatialities could be articulated. 

In the publication Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman defines as the axis of his theory a modernity with a constantly changing form, where time becomes an inseparable variable in its definition, since this form is different in every instant and time defines its own spatiality . If we think of the borders of modernity as those containers of its form, at the different levels of comprehension required, the borders in liquid modernity will be those that are constantly predisposed to change, evidencing their ephemeral character in the generation of space.   

In the same publication when Z.B. quotes Arthur Schopenhauer to explain the emancipation of the individual in modern society, he understands as fundamental the balance of the triangulation between reality, desire and imagination:“one feels free in so far as the imagination is not greater than one’s actual desires, while neither of the two reaches beyond the ability to act”. Hence, the narratives as expressions of desire give us back the -reality- on which the imaginaries of this research will be based, those that can overcome the container borders of late modernity.

The Image-world 

Photography as methodological resource 

Examining the migratory process in Buenos Aires implies using the analysis of the photographic elements part of the modernization process of the Nation, those elements that exercised unlimited authority in the world of images: “A society becomes -modern- when one of its chef activities is producing and consuming images”. At the height of its technological development, photography played a fundamental role as a narrative element and a stimulus to different imaginaries. 

In Susan Sontag's essay on images and photographs she writes “Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images”, referring to the Platonic metaphor, and “Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real” In this way, the photographs do not depend to a greater or lesser extent on their creator, giving them a narrative power that no other system of images possesses. The technical capacity in their production establishes a new relationship between images and reality: the images possess characteristics of real things, and this is how the characteristics of the images are attributed to real things. In a virtual context, reality is increasingly similar to what the cameras show, thus the photographic document ends up becoming the figure of desire, a connector between the real and the imaginary.Architectural imaginaries in contexts of constant change 

Migration, integration methods

The examination of the occupation of the southern neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires and their respective spatial productions can be carried out from the interpretation of the different photographic resources mentioned, the anachronistic publications of the ethnic, popular or official press, the literature of authors such as Roberto Arlt and his urban imaginaries, the essays on urban hygiene and conventillos by Dr. Guillermo Rawson, the sainetes that reflected the social practices in the conventillos, the representative multiethnic artistic expressions such as the Tango and Milonga. All of them and those not mentioned are part of the different narratives of the period and consequently to the definition of their imaginaries, those that influenced the architectural imaginaries which achieved to be formalized and redefined, such as the Collective Houses construction by the National Commission of Cheap Houses.

“ In an enigmatic tale, Danish writer Karen Blixen tells how once upon a time there was a man who lived in a little round house, with a round window and a triangular garden in front. Not far from the house was a pond with fish. One night a big noise woke him up and the man went into the darkness to find out what was causing it. First he began to grope towards the south, and after numerous vicissitudes it seemed to him that he had taken the wrong direction. Then he headed north, but again he thought he heard the noise coming from the south and ran that way. After a long wandering, punctuated by stumbles and falls, he realized that the noise was coming from the bottom of the pond. He rushed to the spot and saw that a deep crack had opened up where the water and fish were escaping. He set to work quickly and only when he had managed to cover the crack did he return home and fall asleep. The next morning, looking out of the window, the man discovered that the trail left by his nightly pilgrimage had drawn the clear outline of a stork”

“What does this image mean? Perhaps that life marked by inconsistencies is suddenly synthesized into a form. Or perhaps the stork is life seen in perspective, reconstructed and revised by memory. The immigrants of whose journey this book speaks drew their stork when they evoked the past by narrating their personal stories before and after the migration, an experience that split their existences in two. Between these halves the sea came in”

This image reconstructed by the sea to which the historian María Bjerg refers in the introduction of her book "Historias de la Inmigración en la Argentina", is the narrative of this research. The analysis of the migrations between the 19th and 20th centuries in the emerging Argentine and its marginality in the modernization process, does not pretend to be based on the historiographic character about the arrival of immigrants and the construction of its citizenship, but it is considered as the lecture of a highly diverse and complex collective in a context of constant redefinition of borders.

In this line of analysis, and considering the notion of borders as an opportunity to imagine the devices for  integration and collectives, it is appropriate Bauman's statement: “If the individual is the citizen’s worst enemy, and if individualization spells trouble for citizenship and citizenship-based politics, it is because the concerns and preoccupations of individuals qua individuals fill the public space to the brim, claiming to be its only legitimate occupants, and elbow out from public discourse everything else.”. Understanding the term -citizen- as the person inclined to seek her or his own welfare through the well-being of the city.

This research proposal has yet to conclude its objective in the imagination of devices from the architectural discipline able to interpret the migratory act, its integration processes and its spatial manifestations, those devices that can invalidate the logics of marginalization; thus, understanding late modernity in which its forms are constantly predisposed to change, and examining the lectures mentioned in relation to the ongoing process of migration, satisfactory responses might be obtained as a contribution towards the field of knowledge.