Ferruccio Corbellani

Abstract

This article reconstructs the life, the training and the professional activity of FerruccioCorbellani, one of the protagonists of Italian emigration to Buenos Aires in the first decades of the 20th Century. It is based on recovered documents of archives in Italy and in a catalogue of works done by this architect, almost unknown in comparison to other compatriots more benefited by the historiography. Corbellani illustrates the capacity of the Italian architects working in Argentina during the first half of the 20th Century, to find their own language among the different ways of expression of eclecticism, Art Déco  and rationalism, according to fashion, the assignments and the preferences of their clients. This ductility demonstrates how ideological battles between academic and modernist architects that encouraged european debates, arrived in a weakened way to the Río de la Plata, where the fast modernization of Buenos Aires city offered a wide range of opportunities to those professionals with academic education.