CAVERI, CLAUDIO
Buenos Aires (Argentina), 1928 – 2011
By Roberto Segre
With the fall of Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, and the corrupt, demagogic, and dictatorial nature of the last years of his government, two trends emerged among Argentine intellectuals: the optimism and hope for democratic development based on the economic consolidation of the country through the process of industrialization; and the questioning of the entry of foreign capital, which invalidated the original justicialist project of strengthening the construction of nationality on the basis of a social agreement. Caveri, an architect from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of Buenos Aires (1950), belonged to this second group. A militant Catholic, he identified with the criticism of the cosmopolitanism of the capitalist and dependent urban structure, in line with the path laid out by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Scalabrini Ortiz, Jauretche, and the philosopher Rodolfo Kusch.
On the international level, he was influenced by Teilhard de Chardin, Sartrean existentialism, and the thought of Martin Buber. He began his professional activity with the canonical “Miesian” design of his residence in Beccar (1951). In partnership with Eduardo Ellis, he designed the Church of Our Lady of Fatima in Martínez, Buenos Aires province, in 1956, at the request of Father Fidel Horacio Moreno, who supported the liturgical renewal of the Church initiated by John XXIII. This work, which synthesized Le Corbusier’s “brutalism” of exposed reinforced concrete with the recovery of formal elements from Argentina’s colonial heritage—the ascetic, whitewashed brick walls—constituted the starting point of a “vernacular” and “pobrista” movement, later identified as “white houses.” It emphasized natural materials, artisanal construction, and the simple forms of popular architecture from the northern provinces.
In 1958, he closed his central office in Buenos Aires and settled in the poor neighborhood of Trujui, in the municipality of Moreno, Buenos Aires province. There, he founded the Tierra Cooperative based on the principle of the “organized community” promoted by justicialism, focusing on self-sustainability and the participation of residents in the construction of their homes and social functions. A set of free and unprecedented forms and volumes emerged, derived from the creativity of the designs and the diversity of construction technologies. In 1974, he founded the Integral Technical School of Trujui to train construction foremen. Appointed Secretary of Public Works of Moreno (1984) and Planning (1986), he developed the project for an atypical prison in the Olmos Program, with small cell units arranged around an internal courtyard, built by the inmates themselves. One of his last works is the Integral Recovery Center for People in Maschwitz, Buenos Aires province (1999), commissioned by Father Moreno and characterized by circular units of rooms culminating in the spatiality of a helicoidal church.
Caveri had a strong influence on the younger generations of architects in the second half of the 20th century through his controversial and aggressive writings, both in defense of his conception of a national identity architecture and in criticism of external dependency, both European and North American. He died in Buenos Aires at the age of 83.
