The Materialization of a National Aesthetic. Ricardo Rojas and Argentinian architecture

Abstract

In 1909, Ricardo Rojas published La restauracio?n nacionalista. The book was meant to reform the education towards patriotic purposes through a series of guidelines established on the text. As part of this work undertaken by Rojas, arts and architecture in particular had a crucial role as social educators. In this paper, we will make an analysis of the text focusing on the role given to the arts and the urban space understood as social educators. In this sense, we will study how Rojas used the city and the architecture in his speech. Through the two works we have selected, we will see to what extent the ideas of Rojas were used in the field of architecture to validate positions that found in the Hispanic past a response to the eclecticism of the early twentieth century.