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Palacio Barolo Revisted

Assiduous readers may recall my posting about the Palacio Barolo, the mad Buenos Aires skyscraper that was conceived as a monument to the genius of Dante.

In a recent entry of Kit Wilson’s excellent Eclectic Letters, novelist (and recent ‘Foidcast’ guest) Thomas Peermohamed Lambert recalls this eccentric edifice:

Palacio Barolo is not my favourite building aesthetically — depending on my mood, that accolade might go to one of Le Corbusier’s Assembly building Chandigarh, or Westminster Cathedral, or the Duomo di Monreale, or the Nakagin Capsule tower — but no other building has lodged itself quite so firmly in my soul. I first visited it in 2018, while I was living in Buenos Aires. Someone mentioned to me that a few blocks from the drab neoclassical Congressional Palace resided the former tallest building in South America, designed by a mad Italian architect to accord with the cosmology of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I had to go.

Palacio Barolo is wonderful enough from the outside: it has a mad, Art Nouveau energy that reminds me, bizarrely, of Brussels. But its interior is even better. Its lobby is lit by orange-glowing pits that are meant to look like Hell’s lowest circles; there are statues of monsters, gargoyles, and pretty much every doorway has some kind of masonic symbol on it. Because labour is cheap in Buenos Aires, the place is also massively and confusingly over-staffed: there are uniformed people buzzing around you, ushering you into clanking iron lifts and up astonishingly decorated staircases whether you ask them to or not. At the top of the building is a completely pointless lighthouse beacon, included for the sole purpose of seeming divine and celestial, and one of the best views of Buenos Aires you’ll ever see.

Published at 4:36 pm on Wednesday 14 January 2026. Categories: Architecture Argentina Errant Thoughts Tags: , , .
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