Theories in Practice. Enrico Tedeschi Between Italy and Cono Sur

In 1963, a V-shaped façade of a small university building appeared in the pages of specialized journals such as The Architectural Review and L’Architettura Cronache e Storia, situating a design project from remote Argentina within purely formal or technological categories. Enrico Tedeschi (1910-1978), Italian architect and educator who emigrated to the Southern Cone of the Americas in 1948, is the inventor of the FAUD building (Universidad de Mendoza) and its iconic façade, which is widely regarded as a direct manifestation of Tedeschi’s theoretical framework and the brick-and-mortar outcome of organic architecture diligently applied to the regional context. However, this chapter aims to present a lateral view on the aura of a supposed emissary of modern architectural trends to the South by scrutinizing Tedeschi’s subtle attempts of "architecting theory" rather than theorizing architecture. Three projects are placed on the opposite side of canonical narratives to reveal the inevitable discontinuities and contingent mechanisms through which architectural ideas circulate across distant localities.