Eurindia or the syntactic organizer of fragments of world. An approach to the concept of “Fusion” in the work of Ángel Guido

Abstract

The aim of this work is to think about the conception of fusion that the architect, urbanist, art historian and writer Angel Guido, born in Rosario (1896-1960), interweaved in his book Hispano Indigenous Fusion in the Colonial Architecture (1925) and that pervaded all his critic and architectural production. Like a compilation, the book is structured as a pretentious scientific study on what he sensed during a travel through Latin America in the 1920’s accompanied by his brother, the painter and graphic designer Alfredo Guido (1892-1957), and his friend, the writer, jurist and filmmaker pioneer Alcides Greca (1889-1956). This traveling experience, that made him discover Eurindia or the close connection between the indigenous background and the European component, refined his gaze and founded a peculiar interpretation of American art and architecture. Thus, Guido displays the notion of fusion as a theoretical tool meaningful to explain the transcultural process in architecture, an architecture that pretends to be the deep inside of a nation. Likewise, we are interested in thinking about that this fusional process works as a mythopoetic result and as a horizon of expectation, anchored in what is to come. This proposal contributes to broaden the limits of the concept the work of Angel Guido because dealing with this notion we tried to include in the analysis unknown letters as well as published papers of different importance together with architectural and theoretical works of the rosarino architect.