Minerva in the Pampa, Sarmiento in the temple. Popular libraries and architectural historicism in the southwest of the province of Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, in Argentina took place the configuration process of the library system, initially encouraged by the State, based on the popular library as institution created, sustained and managed by civil associations. Linked to urban centers in frank expansion, these libraries multiplied throughout the national territory, especially those regions of the pampas that were favored by the implementation of the modelo agroexportador. The southwest of the province of Buenos Aires, recently incorporated into the state domain, was thus the protagonist of the proliferation and development of agricultural and commercial villages that sought to put on the same level their socio-economic advances and their cultural progress. In locations such as Bahía Blanca and Coronel Suárez, there was, consequently, an accelerated modernization in which the literate groups assumed an active role through the foundation of institutions for the promotion of the culture considered legitimate, which thus became brands and agents of change.
This paper intends to investigate the popular libraries of these two urban centers -Bernardino Rivadavia (1882) and Sarmiento (1915), respectively- based on the analysis of the architectural dimension of their institutional headquarters. In this sense, we propose to consider these buildings as polycronic cultural artifacts where different languages and temporalities were articulated in order to construct certains representations of knowledge, literate culture and libraries, as well as of the role that they would fit in the conformation of a modern city according to the patterns of European civilization. The eclectic historicism of the facades that transformed them into authentic temples of knowledge was then combined with the growing spatial rationalization required by the expanding reading public, the increasing bibliographic collections and the gradual professionalization of library practice. Likewise, the buildings were integrated into the urban framework, consolidating the distinction between a center of great symbolic power and a periphery destined, in particular, to the deployment of daily activities related to housing and livelihoods. The presence of Minerva, the roman goddess of wisdom and arts, on the facade of the Bahía Blanca’s library, works, as well, as an iconographic synthesis of the will of these institutions to be inserted into a Western tradition that would prestige their work but also confirm the progress of these lands.
Beyond the empirical contribution of the study of these entities, this article intends to introduce three considerations of general scope. The first refers to the active dimension of cultural artifacts in Latin American modernization processes; far from being mere evidence of the changes, these forms were active agents in them as they contributed substantially to changing the social and cultural experiences of city dwellers. The second question raises the need to consider architectural works as complex, historical and spatially contextualized objects. In this sense, it is considered that the study of buildings cannot be sufficient for itself or split from its articulation with the urban environment and with the function of the institutions they host. Finally, this work raises the need to problematize the totalizing historiographical accounts from the recovery of local and regional histories. The notion of policronia is revealed here more productive than that of anachronism, often used to talk about provincial contexts, while allowing to account for the selective appropriation of elements of existing cultural repertoires according to the possibilities and requirements of receiver societies.