Trading Nations: Architecture, Informal Empire, and the Scottish Cast Iron Industry in Argentina

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The proposal is a study of the Scottish pre-fabricated architectural ironwork industry in Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is known that a considerable amount of the architectural infrastructure built between 1880 and 1930 in cities such as Buenos Aires comprised decorative and other ironwork components from Scottish foundries. Despite the fact that many of these buildings have yet to be fully documented, the Scottish components in them are now considered part of the cultural heritage of Argentina. This project aims to provide for the first time an in-depth analysis of the significant contribution these elements (and the Scottish foundries that produced them) made to the built environment of Argentina.From the end of the nineteenth century through to the beginning of the twentieth, Argentina experienced its largest period of population growth owing mainly to European immigration. This demographic change was dramatic and was accompanied by the largest urbanisation process in the country's history. Many of the buildings erected at this time assumed modern typologies and therefore relied on new forms of construction technology. The use of prefabricated ironwork, widely successful in Europe but virtually unknown in Argentina, was crucial to this modernisation process.At the time Scotland enjoyed a commanding position in the pre-fabricated ironwork industry, facilitated by its creative response to market demand as well as its extraordinary production and export capacity. Latin America constituted one of the industry's principal markets, with Argentina leading the way through rapid industrialisation, increased wealth, and its strategic importance to British national interests. Indeed, Argentinean urbanisation was only made possible thanks to a complex system of economic investment, professional expertise, and construction techniques brought from foreign countries, in particular Britain and France. Scottish industry stands out as a leading contributor to this process. One example of the impact this transfer of knowledge and expertise had on the built environment in Argentina is the case of John Frederick Bateman. Bateman was responsible for pioneering the water supply industry in the United Kingdom, designing and constructing drainage and water supply systems for several major cities, including Glasgow. The basis of his design was adopted in many of the world's largest and most important cities, including Buenos Aires. Furthermore, Bateman's company designed and built one of the most important civic monuments in Buenos Aires, the Palacio de las Aguas ('Palace of the Waters' [1894]), incorporating pre-fabricated iron elements from the Saracen Foundry in Scotland owned by Walter McFarlane. Other examples include the sugar factories in the north of Argentina. Approximately one third of these factories still in operation were designed and erected during this period of mass industrialisation and agricultural modernisation. They stand as testimony to the industrial might of the Scottish iron industry where the majority of these buildings and their machinery were pre-fabricated and manufactured.In exploring these particular aspects of nineteenth-century building practice in Argentina, this study will open a window not only onto the built heritage of cities such as Buenos Aires but also expose an important dimension of the trade network between Britain and Argentina. This will posit architecture and the wider built environment in Argentina as a phenomenon at the intersection between the greater forces of economic development, modernisation, and geo-politics. This is important in the context of recent academic approaches to the study of Britain's imperial and extra-imperial (informal) influence in the wider Atlantic World during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.