Qualla: Hotel Bauen

Hotel Bauen: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On a December morning in 2001, the workers of the Hotel Bauen found the doors of their workplace closed for good. The four-star hotel on Callao Avenue, twenty storeys in the center of Buenos Aires, had run out of money in the depths of Argentina's worst economic collapse, and after a string of firings the owners simply shut it down. For most of the staff that would have been the end of the story. Instead, fifteen months later, they came back, occupied the building, and reopened it as something the country was just beginning to name: an empresa recuperada, a recovered business, run collectively by the very people who cleaned its rooms and cooked in its kitchens. For the next seventeen years the Bauen ran without owners, a hotel that doubled as a free meeting hall for Argentina's workers and a living argument about who a workplace really belongs to.

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Hotel Bauen: Built for a World Cup

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bauen was born in better times, and with public money. It opened in 1978, a modern four-star hotel built to receive the crowds of the FIFA World Cup that Argentina hosted, and won, that June, under a military dictatorship eager to show the world a polished face. Its developer...

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Hotel Bauen: Taking the Building Back

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In March 2003 the former employees did something extraordinary. With the help of the National Movement of Recovered Businesses, the MNER, they occupied the shuttered hotel and set about bringing it back to life with their own hands. There were no managers to tell them what to do ...

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Hotel Bauen: Seventeen Years on Borrowed Ground

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The trouble was that the law never caught up with the workers' courage. Their right to operate the hotel remained legally murky for the whole of its second life. In October 2005 they were told that while they could keep living in the building, they had no right to run a business ...

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Hotel Bauen: The Last Door

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What years of eviction notices could not do, a virus finally did. Through the lean 2010s the cooperative scraped by, the hotel barely staying open, until the COVID-19 pandemic emptied the city of travelers in 2020 and the Bauen closed its doors a final time. A court ordered the b...

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