The Ariston Club is a building in

Mar del Plata Mar del Plata is a city on the coast of the Argentine Sea, Atlantic Ocean, in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. It is the seat of General Pueyrredón Partido, General Pueyrredón district. Mar del Plata is the second largest city in Buenos Aires ...

Argentina Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a country in the southern half of South America. It covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest country in South America after Brazil, the fourt ...

Marcel Breuer Marcel Lajos Breuer ( ; 21 May 1902 – 1 July 1981) was a Hungarian-American modernist architect and furniture designer. He moved to the United States in 1937 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1944. At the Bauhaus he designed the Was ...

. It is part of the

Modern Movement Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

, and complies with four of the five Le Corbusier's Points of Architecture:

piloti Pilotis, or piers, are supports such as columns, pillars, or stilts that lift a building above ground or water. They are traditionally found in stilt and pole dwellings such as fishermen's huts in Asia and Scandinavia using wood, and in e ...

s, free designing of the

floor plan In architecture and building engineering, a floor plan is a technical drawing to scale, showing a view from above, of the relationships between rooms, spaces, traffic patterns, and other physical features at one level of a structure. Dimensio ...

, free designing of the façade, horizontal windows. Ariston 2

Since 2019, it is a National Historic Monument of Argentina.

History

Built in two months during 1948, it is Breuer's only work in Latin America. Its construction was commissioned by the

University of Buenos Aires The University of Buenos Aires (, UBA) is a public university, public research university in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is the second-oldest university in the country, and the largest university of the country by enrollment. Established in 1821 ...

School of Architecture, and local architects Carlos Coire and

Eduardo Catalano Eduardo Fernando Catalano (December 19, 1917 – January 28, 2010) was an Argentine architect. Life and career Born in Buenos Aires, Catalano went to the United States on a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Graduate ...

associated on the project. It was designed to promote the sale of

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in a nearby real state development. Since 1993, it has been abandoned.

Design

Its design, which features a floating concrete double clover, supported by four thin

pillars A column or pillar in architecture and structural engineering is a structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below. In other words, a column is a compression member. ...

that are not visible from the outside—and featuring volcanic lava

tiles Tiles are usually thin, square or rectangular coverings manufactured from hard-wearing material such as ceramic, stone, metal, baked clay, or even glass. They are generally fixed in place in an array to cover roofs, floors, walls, edges, or ot ...

—surrounded by wave-shaped glass and wood, is considered to be ahead of its time. It was built using regional materials as well, such as the stone used in the back wall and wood used in the cladding and openings.

Uses

Initially, the building was designed to hold a cafeteria and restaurant. Its designed allowed for all tables to be placed next to a window. Its golden age was during the fifties when the restaurant was operating. However, from then on, the building fell on disgrace. Several cafeterias used it during the seventies, and, during the eighties, the Bruma y Arena (Mist & Sand) café-bar was installed. Then, the Maryana dancing club followed. During the nineties, it housed the Parrilla Perico barbecue. These uses modified the original structure and downgraded the building's design.

Present day

In 2019, as the Ariston Club was declared National Historical Monument, a proposal for restoration was started, alongside a

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petition. There were concerns about possible structural damage caused by the abandonment and marine corrosion (as the building is located next to the sea), that could impede the restoration. However, a technical report concluded the restoration was possible, as the structural damage was low and limited to certain areas.

References

{{Coord, 38, 06, 24, S, 57, 34, 30, W, display=title Buildings and structures in Mar del Plata Marcel Breuer buildings Buildings and structures completed in 1948 National Historic Monuments of Argentina