Experts, Architects, and Villeros in the Construction of Villa Lugano, Buenos Aires, 1964–73

The city of Buenos Aires, like other Latin American urban centers, underwent significant spatial re-organization that sought to respond to broader structural changes in society and consumption in the 1950s and 1960s. For the first time on a large scale, urban planning and affordable housing became part of the “encounter” of local and foreign experts and technical cadres (including architects, social scientists, economists, engineers, and social workers) as well as of international lending and inter-governmental organizations. This paper seeks to explore this encounter of ideas, experts, and capital in the definition of the problem of housing in Buenos Aires in the 1960s. Through the study of the construction of the housing complexes Lugano 1 & 2, I seek to analyze the application and execution of a significant loan from the Inter-American Development Bank, the modernization of state bureaucracies through the creation of the Comisión Municipal de la Vivienda (as a condition for funding the project), and the arrival of a group of young architects to this office who found in the aesthetic language of the European vanguard the expression of their desires and ideals for a modern city and society in Buenos Aires.  As such, this area in southwest Buenos Aires can be thought of as a “contact zone” between local and transnational forces in which the terms for the ideal city were shaped in an always-contested process.