DECEMBER´S FEATURED DOOR OF THE MONTH – BUENOS AIRES – ARGENTINA

December 3, 2018 SouthAmerica

The Gran Ole city of Buenos Aires closes out one year of posting our favorite select door photographs from South America. Buenos Aires is a huge city with population around twenty million people. The historic center has many large government buildings, opera houses, manors, and mixed in newer shopping centers and banks. With impressive wide avenues that stretch well off to the horizon, the center proved a difficult place to shoot aesthetic door pictures. One must search for blocks and blocks because modern security measures have metal bars, or more modern doors, and those older ones that remain commonly are poorly preserved or covered in graffiti. Photographing doors in Buenos Aires also meant keeping aware of the crowds, watching for robbers, and dealing with drunken men during the morning hours. If that is not painting a romantic picture, then in the somewhat Bohemian barrio of San Telmo, many of the street sides were piled in mounds of trash, the ubiquitous dog crap meant watching where one stepped, and many of the walls smelt of piss. The upscale area of Recoleta did not have these issues, but at the same time we found little in the ways of interesting doors to photograph in the most exulted portion of the city.

The door we selected is not one of the elegant tall ones with ornate carvings and the trappings of the wealthy. We like this one for the rustic appearance in an older building located along a side street just south of the presidential palace. The colors are muted, the texture of the old brick wall is showing through. The dark wood is partially faded, and the door is embedded with iron fixtures imparting almost a medieval appearance.

This door is in the building of Casa de Castagnino, a building facade that was built-in 1780 along Balcarce street. One of Argentina’s leading painters Juan Carlos Castagnino (1908-1972) lived here and displayed his work. For the most part, his paintings and drawings are very sketch-like in style with earth-tone colors. For a short while the building was still used for art exhibitions under the government title of Fondo Metropolitano de La Cultura Las Artes y Las Ciencias, Argentina. We photographed the entrance doorway in 2013. Current photographs on Google maps street view from 2017 showed the building much degraded by idiots with several magnitudes lower skill level in painting by scrawling the walls with graffiti. In April, 2018 the building was repainted and a sign posted that it was for sale, the sale price was listed at $ 820,000 US Dollars. We do not have any more on the status of the structure, if it remains for sale or not.

While spending a week in Buenos Aires we tried the local steakhouses, visited the upscale tango shows at night, and during the morning hours explored different neighborhoods to photograph representative historic doors. We collected 37 door pictures that are included in our book “Doors of South America.” These show a wide variety of style, colors, and contrasts, many echoing the glory days of Argentina’s once booming economy a hundred years ago. Argentina, and Buenos Aires in particular, is art oriented, and we present the collection of historic doors as a form of art for all the texture, contrasts, hues, variety, and symbolism they embody. For more about one particular story of art and Argentina check this post “Venus in the Rio de la Plata”

We close this 2018 year of featuring Doors of South America with Casa de Castagnino.