Unless you’re an architecture buff, the name Clorindo Testa might not ring a bell. But start walking around Buenos Aires, and you’ll inevitably run into his work.

In the financial district, there’s the Banco Hipotecario, with its nimble concrete façade standing in steep contrast to its sturdy surroundings. Nestled within a park a few blocks from the Recoleta Cemetery lies the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno, which seems to float among the trees like a space shuttle. Go to the Centro Cultural Konex (CCKonex), and you can’t miss the bright orange staircase right in the middle of the courtyard.

Testa, who passed away in 2013, would have turned 100 on Sunday —  but his sculpture-like creations continue to make heads turn almost 60 years after they were built.

“Testa’s work is unique because he took what some modernist architects were doing in Europe in the 1960s, reinterpreted it, and offered his own version of brutalism,” architecture critic Miguel Jurado told the Herald. 

Testa’s early works are considered world-class examples of brutalism, an architectural current that surfaced in the 1950s characterized by constructions with minimalist design meant to showcase bare building materials, mainly concrete. In 2022, Architecture Daily ranked the Biblioteca Nacional among the best brutalist buildings in the world to see.  

In addition to being an architect, Testa was also a renowned artist. A painter whose passion for the canvas very much rivaled and, some might say, even surpassed his love of design and building. 

“For him, art and architecture went hand in hand; there was no way of separating them,” Jurado said.

An Italian child and an Argentine architect

Although Testa lived and worked in Buenos Aires his entire life, he was actually Italian. Born in Naples to an Italian father and an Argentine mother, he was only a few months old when he came to Argentina. He never lost ties to the country of his birth, and he credited a trip to Italy after graduating from university in 1948 as instrumental in getting introduced to new architectural ideas that would later influence his work.

From the early stages of his career, Testa relied on design contests to earn lots of commissions. These are open and anonymous competitions where architects present their ideas for a project. In 1956, he won his first major commission, the La Pampa Civic Center, a complex that included the provincial government’s headquarters and several ministries. 

This was also how Testa won the commissions for his two masterpieces, the current Banco Hipotecario and the Biblioteca Nacional.

In 1959, he and architecture firm SEPRA authored the winning proposal to build the local headquarters of the Bank of London and South America, a British bank that operated in the region between 1923 and 1971. Banco Hipotecario purchased the building in 1997.

Testa won the contest for the library in 1962, together with architects Francisco Bullrich and Alicia Cazzaniga. Both buildings heavily feature concrete, displaying the specific material characteristics of brutalism. But they also show signs of Testa’s unique artistic sensitivity, the capability to infuse an air of lightness that stands in contrast with the heaviness associated with concrete

“He conceived architecture as an artistic venture and always had a metaphor on hand to explain things,” Jurado said. During the excavation of the foundation of the Biblioteca Nacional, they found the remains of a glyptodon, a prehistoric species of giant armadillo. 

“Testa would play off that idea and say that he had decided to reassemble the creature, as if the building were some kind of four-legged animal.”

If Testa’s early works relied on a material-based aesthetic, starting in the 1980s, his buildings and trademark style are marked by the strong use of color. “His second stage is lighter, in the sense that he no longer works with a strong material presence and favors design solutions that can be carried out regardless of how it’s been built,” said Jurado.

Noted works from this second stage of his career are the refurbishment of CCKonex and the Recoleta Cultural Center, as well as private homes Capotesta and La Tumbona. Projects built with traditional construction methods and materials where Testa offered his personal touch in aspects like coloring or shapes. 

To Juan Fontana, an artist and architect who began working with Testa in 1989, the differences in style between the two eras had as much to do with Argentina’s economic situation as they did with a change in aesthetics. 

“In the 1950s and 1960s, when he built the bank and the library, there were more opportunities for financing. Money became tighter in the 1980s, and he was very aware of the economic aspect of architecture and building,” Fontana said. After Testa’s death, he and fellow associate Oscar Lorenti took the helm of the practice and finished a few projects their mentor was unable to complete.

Fontana remembers Testa as an affable and generous mentor, but above all as a man who was comfortable in his own skin. “Architects like to talk about who’s the latest trend-setter or who did the most innovative or interesting buildings. But not him; he was free of all that, just interested in his work,” he said, adding that Spanish architect Oriol Bohigas gave the best definition of Testa he ever heard. 

“He was a man without anguish.”

Cover photo of Biblioteca Nacional / All images by Daniela Mac Adden, courtesy of Fundación Clorindo Testa and Estudio Clorindo Testa