Dear June,

You ask me how we are doing here in Buenos Aires, living through a quarantine of more than a hundred days. The government quickly took the measures to impose it, advised by an excellent group of infectious disease experts, and people supported the decision, motivated by the need to prepare the precarious health system for the inevitable expansion of the virus by “flattening” the curve of contagion.

The reports say that today they are more than 75,000 cases in Argentina, of which 1,500 have been fatal, out of a population of 45 million inhabitants. An estimated 95% of the victims live in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires (with 15 million people). The number of victims continues to be low compared to our neighbors Brazil and Chile, but we still haven’t reached the “peak”—so we continue to be shut up in our houses. There’s no certainty about when we will return to normal, if such a thing will even exist some day.

The only concrete (“real”) thing I can describe in this isolation is the space inside my apartment, which I share with my partner. “I come down” abruptly. I was studying the impact of scientific metaphors on architectural forms, submerged in the homogenous and empty Newtonian expression, in the dancing chaos of the quantum universe and in the micro-world of subatomic particles; I come back to our common space, in which there are directions, borders, individualities, things.

I hang on to these things: the forgotten toy of my granddaughter, whom I cannot hug; the watercolor given to me by an artist friend whom I can only see on a computer screen; my grandmother’s old armchair. Things take on a different meaning. Before the pandemic, my hours went by looking at the “blank page” of the computer screen, immersed in whatever I was researching. I might as well have been on a space ship. Now, whatever relationship with memories, affectionate emotions, daily life, is embodied in things: an unknown carpenter carved the scrollwork on my rustic table; old typesetters arranged, letter by letter, the print characters of the book I am reading; the brushwork on the painting my friend made with pigment that he ground himself. Each thing guards its very own history, and not just those things made to last: the last autumn flowers or the dough slowly rising become things themselves—happenings to which I had never paid too much attention before. We privileged residents of Buenos Aires have transformed into gardeners of potted plants and enthusiastic cooks of “whatever’s in the fridge,”sending tips to friends–gestures of love for  whatsapp, how things turned out, what they looked liked, how we used to watch my nonno make the noodles every Sunday. To cultivate plants and to recycle leftovers take on a moral importance that goes beyond ecological alerts (“don’t waste food,” they told us as kids, while we sprouted some beans). Material, tangible reality, of things and beings who surround us estabish a continuity between the past and the future which—even if precarious—ties together the years and the generations.

I began a graphic diary of the quarantine, taking photos of the small things that construct this domestic space; the new buds on the plants or the neighbor’s cat, who is our one and only visitor.  With the hours in suspension, the sprouting of beans begins to have as much importance as the germination of words—or rather, in my own head, the relationship between the two assumes its proper place.

I invite you then, June, to my home. I want everyone to come over, because—the pride of everyone from Buenos Aires—the doors are always open. Since my childhood, the idea of “home” is a table where people gather around, talking different languages, eating, singing and drinking wine, whether they are friends, relatives or newcomers. I entertain with recipes from around the world that I have learned how to cook thanks to my very mixed extended family. That has not benefited trom the construction boom—which has created an advantage of which I am very appreciative: it kept the low building. I live on an upper floor of an old apartment house, constructed around 1900. Its layout is the type known as casa chorizo—a sausage house: a series of rooms looking over a patio or an open passageway. I have a balcony from which I can look out onto the street and greet my neighbors as they go out with their masks to buy groceries; a sunny corridor that looks northwards and a rooftop deck that we call a terraza. It’s a traditional flat roof like the ones found in the Mediterranean, covered with red tiles. The 19th-century ladies used to drink their mate tea here, looking over the river and observing the boats: the terrace then was a tie to the entire world.  Today it is my “outside” where I can see green and watch the sky. With the paralysis of automobile traffic, our River Plate (we name the people of the region after the river) sky has never been more blue, even though we are in winter; the bees and butterflies visited the last flowers a few days ago already; early in the morning, we can still hear the birds sing.

These advantages would not have been enough to keep me sane if they had not mingled with the window of the internet: today more than ever, we depend on technological advances to maintain contact with others. I am a digital illiterate, and I am not particularly enthusiastic about leading a life on screen, but how coud I live without talking every day with my children, friends and, above all, my grandkids, using multiple platforms. And in the evening, thanks to the abundance of online streaming availability, do we not recuperate a lost world through old movies in which people could still hug each other?

Virtual communication not only helps with confinement; it is the key means for the open and cooperative sensibility promoted by young people, who have taken up the torch of criticism of the injust and dangerous socio-environmental order. But I cannot help but think that, at the same time as we promote austerity in energy consumption, recycling the garbage in compost, we rest on the advantages of the e-world, which inevitably implies the exploitation of the earth. Cellphone batteries, personal computers or elctric autmobies demand the exploitation of new minerals such as lithium of “white gold” concentrated in the triangle of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Bolivia y Chile have 80 percent of world reserves); and it is not unlikely that the South ends up being plundered to finance the “clean” circulation of the North.

I don’t need to explain the gravity of the local situation in socio-economic terms. Argentina is on the brink of a “technical default;” small companies and businesses that were the pillars of daily activity have shut their doors forever; the greatest concentration of virus cases is in the marginalized neighborhoods, where thousands of people are crowded together; government measures aren’t enough to alleviate this situation of inequality that has been worsening for decades.  In this context, it is not only difficult to maintain the quarantine; it is even more difficult to find the forms to confront this crisis. It’s most likely that we return to forms of production and consumption that, if indeed they could stimulate the economy in the short run, will put us in situations as serious as the ones we are experiencing today. Poor and indebted nations cannot confront the drastic changes in the productive plan that our current form of living demands, if the global system continues as it has up until now—without institutions and common agreements that recognize that a problem in Africa or South America do not affect only its inhabitants.

It appears that, with the fall of utopias, we have no imagination left to project another future. The visions tend to choose, as the Italian writer Umberto Eco would say, between apocalyptic and integrated, monopolizing the social media and the press. It’s difficult to find viable solutions for the transformation of a system that only promises humanity the record of being the record of being the only species that consciously accelerates its own extinction. Can we encounter sensible and realistic paths that do not rest on the myth of some Eden nor lead to the relentless exploitation of the earth? Is it possible to imagine another way of producing, of projecting?

It’s not strange to me that one of the most read articles in my field, the production of living space, is French philosopher Bruno Latour, who is determined to overcome the one-sided visions in our relation with the world. His optimism paradoxically rests in productive paralysis, which not only demonstrates the human role in the alterations in the biosphere, but also shows that we can put a brake on this frantic race. He proposes a questionaire based on one’s own experience—that which does not separate body and mind, imagination and physical events, space and time—with the hope of using “this time of imposed confinement to describe what we are tied to, what we are willing to let go of, the chains we are prepared to take up again and those which, because of our behavior, we are willing to break.” (Bruno Latour,“¿Qué medidas se pueden pensar para evitar el regreso del modelo precrisis?”). What activities do we want to take up again just like before and what do we want to discard? How do we imagine the transition?  I take up Latour’s gauntlet and advocate his idea, that of exchanging experiences in a friendly and simple fashion.

For us architects, the challenge is the City, which was always our horizon. The Latin American world is one of cities (in Argentina, 92 percent of the population is urban, while the world average is 54 percent). If we abdicate from the city, as some green ideologues propose—in effect, the environmental impact of the city is great—we have to give up much more than just exploiting fossil fuel.

The city is much greater than its technical dimensions: it is a collective work of art; a space of collaborative political action; a relatively permanent stage made by human hands which, as Hannah Arendt said so well, rises up against  “the sublime indifference of an untouched nature,” the inevitable destiny of entropic chaos. Above all, the City is a place of encounter with the Other (those who do not belong to out family, our tribe, our  gens).

It is questionable that a metropolis (Metropoli) can properly be called a city: it has no limits; it dissembles into suburbs that aren’t quite “country.” The urban history of the 19th and 20th century witnessed of remediation that did not do away with the ghettos nor urban sprawl with its little houses on patches of green, with the malls that could only be reached by car, nor the groups of high-rise buildings with their air conditioning and amenities defending themselves against the informal cohort of poverty.

Nevertheless, the cities of the River Plate have not given up on the old aspiration of considering themselves open to the world, although in the last decades, social and cultural differences have grown abruptly, urban plans favor integration—that crude reality imposed on them. In places like Montevideo, the most democratic spatial experience of all Latin American cities, from the favela-like areas of Cerro or the housing developments of the South, residents enjoy the same coastline, the same beach, the same exceptional views as upper-class dwellings. With about 1.5 million residents,  Montevideo maintains its demographic density —but it is a wakable city, open to the river and the horizon. It is the city I most love; but Buenos Aires, for better or worse, is my homeland. And in spite of the decadance of the mythic “Paris of South America,” every day more and more fragmentes, she shares this imaginary, this vision, with many cities of the River Plate. En Balvanera, before the quarantine, one could hear all the distinctive accents of South American Spanish—conjugated here alla italiana—; adding to it a bit of French patois, and the Guaraní that the German Jesuits transcribed. The architectural structure of my city condenses its aspirations for equality and mixing.

That’s what I’m lacking in the quarantine. I don’t miss the long and uncomfortable journeys in which it takes two hours to get from one place to another; I miss the moment in which, waiting for a train, a group of Venezuelan emigrants offered me a magnificent concert. More than a hundred musicians managed to get from Venezuela to Buenos Aires, to make their life playing music on the streets. They formed an orchestra, which also incorporated Syrian emigrants and played their music in a prestigious theatre in  2018.

I stopped to listen attently to the music because it provides the tone for every urban landscape in its dialects, murmurs, rhythms and melodies. This music is absent now, although we can listen to it on podcasts: its absence is marked by the inevitable background of urban noise, but also by the fact that the music of River Plate is initimately related to dance. I refer, as you might have guessed, to tango—although it also faces the same temporary destiny as other “embracing” dances such as the chamamé. In the milongas of Buenos Aires, those grand dance fests in which everyone is dancing tango, people do not dance with one’s own partner; you invite those who are light on their feet, whether they are ugly, pretty, known or unknown.

The tango—of disputed origin: African? creole?— involves a certain physical, sensual closeness, which few other dances possess. Is this a reflection of our “Latin” heritage, which presumably leads us to hug each other, kiss each other (men and women alike), touch each other? But don’t the Russians kiss each other three times, the last on the mouth? The tango reveals aspects of this physical relationship, which transcends races, nationalities, genders and sexual identities.

And suddenly, we cannot hug each other. What will we do (and it’s not only a question of economics) without the tourists who come to dance tango? This is the  charm of our urban music: a fraternity—in the sense of liberté, égalité, fraternité—that we have judged many times as sentimental and now, with the dance an impossibility, we miss it. June, my friends, come drink mate tea with me—virtually—since we can no longer share the metal straw.

Graciela