Victoria Ocampo once described the house she had built around 1927 in Mar del Plata —the most elegant Argentine seaside resort of the times— as “an austere white cube, with terraces facing the sun and the sea.” The architecture stood as one of the first examples of the modern house in Argentina. The years of the construction were ones of great inter-cultural dialogue and of new relationships (with Keyserling, Ansermet, Le Corbusier) for Victoria. Ernesto Katzenstein described the period as “years of searching but also of affirmation.” The novel architectural style, however, scandalized the Mar del Plata community that sought refuge in Neo-Tudor homes. Victoria recalled that for its first few months the house was besieged by bands of curious tourists who arrived en mass in order to see “the ugliest house in the city,” and rang the doorbell to ask if it they had arrived at a factory or a stable.

Victoria, in her customary manner, held strong against her critics and had a second home built, this time in Buenos Aires. The Rufino de Elizalde house, located in the Palermo Chico neighborhood and today belonging to the National Fund for the Arts, would constitute, according to the architect Fabio Grementieri, Victoria’s “true thesis.” Constructed without moldings, cornices, or ornamentation, and with smooth white walls, the building seemed to triumph over masses and proportions. Le Corbusier, after visiting the home while in Buenos Aires, wrote in his Un Etat de l’a architecture et de l’urbanisme that: “Until now only she has taken a decisive step in architecture, by constructing a house that causes a scandal… I found in Victoria Ocampo’s home works by Picasso and Léger framed by a purism that I have rarely seen elsewhere.”

Again the neighborhood objected to the construction. They thought the home incongruent alongside their facsimiles of European mansions. But Victoria did not pay heed to these criticisms. Waldo Frank, an admirer of the new building, would write: “In the middle of this quarter of affected elegancies, of elegancies supported by a social class too young to even allow its heart to speak in public, a simple house can be seen, back to back with the rhetorical palace that is the Spanish Embassy. It is like a sunbeam shining through in a place filled with ((feldas)) and silks. The walls of the house are whitened brick. The oblong windows fit the walls they occupy well. They are narrow on the first floor and widen proportionally as they go up. The gray metal front doors are marked with a bronze knocker, and the house is encircled by cedars. In summer, when the windows are opened completely, the rooms are transformed into porticos. There are no paintings (do you mean cuadros as paintings or frames?). In the dining room, an antique mahogany table from England holds a small cactus in a clay pot.

The owner of the house would not tire of explaining that she had aimed to create rooms that reached into the sky and the trees, that she had wanted space, bare white walls, and “a background so neutral and so clear that the color of a book’s binding, the yellow of a hat on the table, a flower in a vase, a spot of blue sky reflected in the mirror, would be a sudden feast for the eyes.”

The interior of the house, admired by Le Corbusier for what he considered to be a graceful resolution to “the adventure of furnishings,” was completed by the mahogany dining room table, a Picasso and a Leger canvas, a piano, and books scattered throughout the rooms. It was free of superfluous objects. Everything was positioned to correspond to its function, exactly as explained by Victoria in her Autobiografía VI: “From the moment a piece of furniture is placed somewhere without purpose, it becomes bothersome.... The furnishing of spaces is something that has always fascinated me. Rooms can often rouse in me an affection or a violent distaste. It is almost physical. A type of climate. It is not a matter of the percentage of luxury or of objects of artistic or monetary value that one can acquire, but rather, above all, of a subtile harmony... for my own happiness it is necessary that a Louis XV armchair be a Louis XV armchair, that a kitchen chair or a reed table be a kitchen chair and a reed table...”

With a clear and certain vision and a will of steel, Victoria allowed into her Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata houses the modern architectural style that had encountered so much opposition from early 20th century Argentines.
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