Brutalism in Argentina

Argentina produced some of South America's most inventive brutalism, centered on Buenos Aires in the 1960s. Its dominant figure was Clorindo Testa, painter and architect, whose Banco Hipotecario (1966), the former Bank of London and South America designed with SEPRA, is a landmark of the movement worldwide, a perforated concrete shell hung over a sunken banking hall.

Testa later won the competition for the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno with Francisco Bullrich and Alicia Cazzaniga in 1962, though the raised concrete library only opened in 1992. The style suited Argentina's strong engineering culture and its taste for monumental public institutions.