Migration of Mediterranean language in Argentina

The thesis proposal examines the possibility of the existence of a Mediterranean culture of living and tries to understand in which way it is possible to propose it in the project analyzing Italian architects’ works in other countries. The Mediterranean, according to French historian Fernand Braudel, is «a thousand things together. It is not one landscape, but numerous landscapes; it is not one sea, but a complex of seas. It is not one civilization, but a number of civilizations, piled one above the other…». This important definition allows us to identify a common architectural language in these many landscapes and seas, in so far as «the perfect rationality coincided with the optimum of aesthetic values» (Belli, 1976). For this reason, the Mediterranean is the bearer of an architectural language characterized by simple and harmonious buildings, without decorative elements, that don’t dominate the landscape or try to disguise themselves, but reproduce the beauty and the relations of nature. The tool that allows the diffusion of the architectural Mediterranean language in other countries far from the sea is migration, which is analyzed as a cultural phenomenon that permits the exchange between people with cultural differences and these «intercultural relations take place over time, during which individuals explore, learn, forget, adapt…» (John W. Berry, 2011). In the past, the migration of many Italian architects, engineers and skilled workers in Argentina allowed the diffusion of a way of doing architecture that sometimes, to a certain extent, has the typical character of the Mediterranean language. This is the case of the Italian architect ClorindoTesta, born in Naples in 1923, who studied and worked in Buenos Aires, the city Jorge Luis Borges though always existed, like water or air. The architectures of ClorindoTesta are fragments of an idea of the city and receive the inheritance of a far world with a variation of the Mediterranean language, as well as cubism, purism, rationalism and brutalism