Memories of Buenos Aires: Signs of State Terrorism in Argentina

38. Plaza Houssay

66 2 M. T. de Alvear Av. Santa Fe Arenales Paraguay Av. Córdoba Viamonte Tucumán San Luis E c u a d o r Av. Ca llao R. Peñ a Mon tevid eo Rio bam ba Ay acu cho Jun ín U ri b u ru A z c u é n a g a L a rr e a A v . P u e y rr e d ó n Piz zur no Est. Callao Est. Fac. de Medicina Est. Pueyrredón LÍNEA D 38 RECOLETA LOCATION: BETWEEN AV. CÓRDOBA, PTE URIBURU , PARAGUAY AND JUNÍN TRANSPORTATION: BUSES: 12, 29, 39, 60, 61, 68, 75, 95, 99, 101, 106, 111, 132, 140, 152, 194. SUBWAY STATION: FACULTAD DE MEDICINA (D LINE). A memorial set up in Plaza Houssay in December 2007 pays tribute to the students, teachers, and staff of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and to the staff of the José de San Martín Clinical Hospital who were victims of detention and disappearance during the last military dictatorship . The Clinical Hospital and the faculties of Economics, Medicine, Pharmacy and Biochemistry, Dentistry , and Social Sciences of the UBA all surround this square . From 1877 to 1975, when its demolition began, the Clinical Hospital stood on the site of the current Plaza Houssay . The facilities were then moved to a new location in the next block, on the corner of Avenida Córdoba and José E . Uriburu Street . The Plaza, named after Bernardo A . Houssay , winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, was inaugurated in July 1980 . The final project differed from the original plan, which had envisaged the site as the hospital’s square and parking lot . The only building to be preserved from that block was the chapel from the central courtyard of the old Clinical Hospital . Dictatorship and urbanism The effects of the last military dictatorship ’s policies can also be seen in some of the changes made to public spaces . The urban design projects developed in those years displayed an aesthetic of rupture and rigidity . Projects embodied fragmentation, dissociation, and a reformulation of the city’s relationship to its inhabitants . For example, the Urban Freeway plan divided the city, prompting the forced displacement of an economically marginalized segment of the population toward the outskirts . This expulsion took shape in the shantytown eradication plan carried 38 . Plaza Houssay MEMORIAL IN THE PLAZA BERNARDO HOUSSAY. 67 out by the Municipal Housing Commission (see “Club Atlético, ” p . 129) . Other design interventions included paved squares like the Plaza Houssay, which were created in vacant lots or on the sites of older neighborhood squares . These revealed aspects of the dominant ideology, though sometimes only unconsciously . Urban space has always been a stage for the expression of social conflicts, and the state has often sought to design space as a medium of control and discipline . It has done so by structuring not only the space itself, but also its modes of use, thereby regulating social practices and the manner in which people have inhabited urban space . Plaza Houssay was designed and built as a “transitory space” emptied of its function as a site for human encounters and socializing . Below the level of the sidewalk, the main material used is concrete . Isolated green areas are enclosed in concrete borders, and access to the Plaza is restricted and defined by cement blocks, ramps, and stairways . Transmission and the resignification of space The plaza took on new characteristics with the return to democracy after 1983 . The university students transformed some of its original properties once they were free to use it for social purposes . It became a place for meetings, many of them organized by students from the surrounding university faculties . It also hosted an annual sculpture competition from 1988 to mid-1990 . Public art played a key role in transforming the square . The walls that had earlier marked its boundaries became backdrops for political action, as they were decorated PLAZA HOUSSAY, WITH THE FACULTY OF ECONOMICS IN THE BACKGROUND. 68 with graffiti and a large mural bearing the names of disappeared students . Sellers once again used the Plaza’s informal entryways for their craft stalls and secondhand book stands, thereby reclaiming the space as a marketplace . Since the 1990s the Plaza has witnessed several massive demonstrations in defense of publicly funded university education and in favor of increases in education spending . The university sector was hit particularly...