The Grid and the Park

Adrián Gorelik (Mercedes, Buenos Aires, 1957) is an architect trained at the University of Buenos Aires, where he also obtained his doctoral degree in history. He is a researcher of the Argentine research council (CONICET) and full professor at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes,where he has directed the Centro de Historia Intelectual. He has held the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. In 2012 he held the Simón Bolívar professorship at the University of Cambridge. He was member of the board of directors of the journal Punto de Vista and is currently part of the editorial committee of Prismas. Revista de Historia Intelectual. He has published widely on urban and intellectual cultural history, architecture and urban thought in Argentina and Latin America. His books include La sombra de la vanguardia. Hannes Meyer en México, with Jorge F. Liernur (Buenos Aires, 1993; Santiago de Chile, 2019); La grilla y el parque. Espacio público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1998), Miradas sobre Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 2004); Das vanguardas a Brasília. Cultura urbana e arquitetura na América Latina (Belo Horizonte, 2005); and Correspondencias. Arquitectura, ciudad, cultura (Buenos Aires, 2011). He is an influential voice in public debates regarding urban policies and culture in Buenos Aires. ORCiD: 0000-0002-9198-7597

Since its publication in Spanish in 1998, The Grid and the Park not only revitalized studies on the history of Buenos Aires, but also laid the foundation for a specific type of cultural work on the city -an urban perspective for cultural history, as its author would describe it- that has had a sustained impact in Latin America. Public space, embodied in the grid of city blocks and the park system, here appears as a particularly productive category because it encompasses dimensions of the material city, politics, and culture, which are usually studied separately. From Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's figurations of Palermo Park in the mid-nineteenth century to Jorge Luis Borges's discovery of the suburb in the 1920s; from the modernization of the traditional center carried out by Mayor Torcuato de Alvear in the 1880s to the questioning of that centrality by the emergence of the suburban barrio, the book weaves the changing ideas on public space with urban culture to produce a new history of the metropolitan expansion of Buenos Aires, one of the most extensive and dynamic urban centers of the early twentieth century.