Clorindo Testa
b. Naples, 1923.

Clorindo Testa - Prominent Latin-American famous architect who employs a rigorously empirical approach to the process of architecture. He studied at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the National University of Buenos Aires at a time when the academic curriculum was still dominated by the Beaux-Arts tradition. After graduating in 1948 he joined the Buenos Aires Regulating Plan but left the following year for Italy, where he spent three years pursuing an abiding interest in painting. On returning to Argentina he established a private practice, but he prefers to work with a diversity of colleagues on individual projects. Thus his work defies easy classification, but it is often characterized by a boldness of form and spatial manipulation also seen in his paintings and sketches. The use of a heavily textured concrete finish in his competition-winning design for the project at La Pampa, Santa Rosa, is often credited as the first Brutalist building in Argentina. His best-known work, the Bank of London in Buenos Aires, a huge concrete structure dominating a narrow street, is often cited as the city’s most important 20-century building.

Major buildings / works:
Civic Centre and Bus Terminal, Santa Rosa (with Boris Dabinovic, Augusto Gaido and Francisco Rossi), 1955-63.
Bank of London and South America, Buenos Aires (with Sepra), 1959-66.
National Library, Buenos Aires (with Francisco Bullrich and Alicia Cazzaniga de Bullrich), 1962-84; unfinished (1990).
Government Hospital, Ivory Coast, 1979.

Bibliography:
Julio Llimas, Clorindo Testa, Buenos Aires, 1962.
Francisco Bullrich, New Directions in Latin- American Architecture, New York, 1969. Damian Bayon and Paolo Gasparini, The Changing Shape of Latin-American Architecture, Chichester, 1979.
World Architecture S (special issue), 1990.