Qualla: The Works of Francisco Salamone

The Works of Francisco Salamone: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Drive the empty roads of southern Buenos Aires Province and the land gives you almost nothing to look at. Grass to the horizon, wind, the occasional windmill. Then a town appears, and rising from its center is a tower so strange it seems beamed in from another planet: a soaring concrete slab, sharp-edged and severe, a clock face glowing near its summit, taller than the church beside it. This is a Salamone. Between 1936 and 1940, an Italian-born architect named Francisco Salamone scattered more than sixty of these monuments across the pampas, then disappeared so completely that he died in 1959 nearly forgotten by the country he had reshaped.

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

The Works of Francisco Salamone: The Four-Year Whirlwind

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elquache, CC BY-SA 3.0. Salamone (1897-1959) was not a man who worked slowly. He had begun in Córdoba in 1933, paving roads and building a slaughterhouse, before a change in local politics pushed him east to Buenos Aires Province. There he found his patron: Manuel Fresco, the conservative governor who r...

Image: Elquache | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Works of Francisco Salamone: Towers Over the Grass

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ctynik, CC0. The town halls were Salamone's boldest statement. He gave each one a tower that deliberately overtopped the local church steeple, a sculptural shaft of concrete meant to symbolize the advance of the modern state across the plains. The style borrowed from Italian Futurism and the ...

Image: Ctynik | CC0

The Works of Francisco Salamone: Gates for the Dead

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Franchense, CC BY-SA 4.0. Salamone reserved some of his most haunting work for the places where the living rarely linger. His cemetery portals at Saldungaray, Laprida, Azul, Balcarce, and Salliqueló turn the entrance to the graveyard into theater. The 1938 gate at Saldungaray is the most famous: a vast wh...

Image: Franchense | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Works of Francisco Salamone: Fall and Resurrection

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit darcacha, CC BY-SA 3.0. When Fresco was removed from power in 1940, Salamone's pampas career ended almost as abruptly as it began. He moved to Buenos Aires, was accused of corruption over a paving contract, went briefly into exile in Uruguay, and after the charges were dropped he never built at that sca...

Image: darcacha | CC BY-SA 3.0