In a corner of the central port city, the product of a restricted competition organized in 1959, stands the Bank of London building, now Banco Hipotecario Nacional. Is notable for the plastic treatment of their facades, consisting of large pieces of concrete seen that seem to drip from the roof onto the street, acting as a structural support and perforated screen, which articulates specific membrane generous and expansive interior space with the narrow urban space, materializing a particular intention of continuity between the two areas. This continuity was one of the premises of the proposal by Testa, with the clear intention to penetrate the narrow downtown streets inside the building, forming a sort of roofed plaza, In his own words. The public entrance is through the corner, receding doors and putting together a space between the interior and exterior, which is virtually limited by a high concrete screen hanging on the corner.
However, because of its scale, its heights, even by the faint extension of certain lines and the persistence of certain rhythms, the Bank established a subtle dialogue with its neighbors, decimónicos and academics.
Testa was born in Naples in 1923, but comes to young children Argentina, where he teaches. In the early 50′s, after graduating as an architect, spend time in Italy. When he returned to Buenos Aires, is set as an architect and also started a prolific career as an artist. It is impossible to separate the two activities. Testa is an architect and artist, artist and architect. These two conditions explains many of the plastic qualities of their buildings, sculptural handling of certain materials and unbiased use of color, volumes and shapes along its entire production.
Establish lines of continuity in their work becomes a difficult task almost impossible. The same can be said of his influences, which do not clearly emerge, although in the early stage when you do this project, the most often cited by critics (and perhaps the most obvious) is the mature Le Corbusier on the Unite d’habitation and Romchamp. As the Swiss master, Testa calls in his person the categories of artist and architect, but seems much less concerned with determining the mechanisms that order their production.
But back to the building in question. Emerged from the pen of a young Testa, which is associated with a larger study experience SEPRA (Sanchez Elia, Peralta Ramos, Agostini) for its realization, the project begins to subvert many of the assumptions that were supposed immovable for a bank building and that responded to the need to renew the image of the institution that organized the competition. The usual surround muraria, dull and heavy, it is now very clear for the parameters of the time, with the glass forming a second skin that runs behind the concrete screens.
The interior product of a bold structural operation is multiple, complex, transparent, urban willing. Allows cross looks from the inside out, from one level to another, from top to bottom, from bottom to top. The public and employees circulate generous spaces, rich. The filtered light enters through the perforated screens and spills for the concrete surfaces that embodies exquisite seen throughout the building.
On the facades, concrete depth appears, almost unarmed, its tectonic logic seems reversed. This material, excluding protagonist of the play, is made with pieces of wood formwork, whose texture can still be seen on all surfaces. No prefabrication, no repetition, the plastic material is treated by hand. However, aluminum frames and large panes of glass in some way referenced to a nascent industrial development, reflecting the identity for Latin America in progress, Horacio Torrent writes in his article “South America: Then and Now.”
A large concrete column organizes the central area of ??the building, both spatially and structurally. A sculptural staircase wraps one side, but this element is also lifts box. The four upper slabs (for internal use by bank) hang by steel tensioning the roof slab, the two lower levels (public use) are trays which are supported by columns fungiform, clearing the central space in multiple high. Neither the upper slabs or trays do not touch the large central column, facades or walls. Through these operations, Testa free plants and flexible space.
A detailed observation of these plants shows the implied presence of grids that order, but remain in deep, that are not clearly visible, contaminated unusual compositional freedom and free of severe geometric restraints, although they are functional for strictly programmatic.
Become an iconic building a mature and “modernity” River Plate, the Bank of London is a National Historic Landmark since 1999.
