CIRCULO MILITAR The Circulo Militar is one of the most beautiful buildings in all of Buenos Aires, and it seems to have been plucked out of France's Loire Valley. It was built as the mansion of the Paz family, the owners of the newspaper La Prensa, whose original office was on Avenida de Mayo and is now the Casa de Cultura. The Paz family was one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the whole country, and some will still call this building by its two old names -- Palacio Paz and Palacio Retiro. Now officially called the Circulo Militar, named for the society of retired military officers who bought the building in 1938. It was built in stages spanning from 1902 to 1914, under the direction of the French architect Louis H. M. Sortais. The commissioner of the project, family patriarch Jose Clemente Paz, died in 1912 and never saw its completion. Marble and other materials throughout the building were imported from all over Europe. Most rooms are reminiscent of Versailles, especially the bedrooms and the gold-and-white music hall with an ornate parquet floor and windows overlooking the plaza. Other rooms are in the Tudor style, and the Presidential Room, where men would retreat for political conversation, is the most unusual. Very masculine and dark, it is lit by strange chandeliers decorated with naked hermaphrodite characters with beards and breasts, whose faces contort as they are lanced through their private parts. It is unknown why this was the decorative theme of a room intended for politics. The six elevators are original to the building and the overall height of the building is eight stories, though with their high ceilings, there are only four levels to the building. The most impressive room is the round Hall of Honor, which sits under an interior rotunda and even has a balconied second level overlooking a stage. It was a private mini-opera house, covered in multicolored marble and gilded bronze, used now for conferences. Excerpt from Frommer's ------- BUENOS AIRES ARCHITECTURE Buenos Aires architecture is characterized by its eclectic nature, with elements resembling Barcelona, Paris and Madrid. Italian and French influences increased after the declaration of independence at the beginning of the 19th century, though the academic style persisted until the first decades of the 20th century. Attempts at renovation took place during the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, when European influences penetrated into the country, reflected by several buildings of Buenos Aires such as the Iglesia Santa Felicitas by Ernesto Bunge; the Palace of Justice, the National Congress, and the Teatro Colon, all of them by Vittorio Meano. The simplicity of the Rioplatense baroque style can be clearly seen in Buenos Aires through the works of Italian architects such as Andre Blanqui and Antonio Masella, in the churches of San Ignacio, Nuestra Senora del Pilar, the Cathedral and the Cabildo. The architecture of the second half of the 20th century continued to reproduce French neoclassic models, such as the headquarters of the Banco de la Nacion Argentina built by Alejandro Bustillo, and the Museo Hispanoamericano de Buenos Aires of Martin Noel Since the 1930s, the influence of Le Corbusier and European rationalism consolidated in a group of young architects from the University of Tucuman, among whom Amancio Williams stands out. The construction of skyscrapers proliferated in Buenos Aires until the 1950s. Newer modern high-technology buildings by Argentine architects in the last years of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st include the Le Parc Tower by Mario Alvarez, the Torre Fortabat by Sanchez Elia and the Repsol-YPF tower by Cesar Pelli. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia