Regreening The City

The new convention center in Buenos Aires: green local perspectives. 

- Jimena Martignoni

The new Convention and Exhibition Center in Buenos Aires is the result of a national competition called in 2012 by the Ministry of Urban Development, a division of the City Government, and the Central Society of Architects (SCA). Awarded to architect Edgardo Minond and Estudio Bulla, the project is at final stages and the city has now a new park displaying large masses of native plants, the first of this kind. The site is enclosed in the so called “museums ´corridor”, making part of an urban axis which connects some of the most important local museums, and connected at one side with the traditional building of the Faculty of Law of the Buenos Aires University and an existing large park, and to the opposite with another large traditional park. The wining project proposed to bury the building for the Convention Center and to create a large green roof, or “topographical roof”, which would be perceived as another park. Not a separate park but a piece of a larger single green plane criss-crossed by a pedestrian integrating path system.

Lucía Ardissone, one of the partners of Estudio Bulla, says: “We wanted the three parks to be read as a single urban green piece; an ecology patch within the city […] A natural place where to serve our native fauna, attracting butterflies, birds, insects, especially being so close to the Ecological Preserve of the City of Buenos Aires.”