(b Buenos Aires, 1892; d Buenos Aires, 1978). Argentine architect. From the age of 15 he attended the school of architecture set up in 1901 by Alejandro Christophersen in the Universidad de Buenos Aires, where his final projects revealed a challenge to prevailing academic attitudes that continued throughout a successful professional career. Virasoro acknowledged the influence upon his work of Léon Bakst’s stage designs for the Diaghilev ballet, which visited Buenos Aires after World War I, and of Matila Ghyka’s early books on the theories of mathematical proportion: Esthétique des proportions (Paris, 1927) and Le Nombre d’or (Paris, 1931). In line with the populist reforms of the 1920s, Virasoro adopted high standards of performance and provided good facilities for employees in his design and construction organization, for which he adopted the motto Viribus Unitis. Although the change to right-wing government in 1930 caused the collapse of Virasoro’s practice, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of the Modern Movement in Latin America and of prefabricated housing in particular. His approach to modernism was through Art Deco, for example in his own house (1925) at calle Agüero, Buenos Aires, and in La Equitativa del Plata (1929), which has been criticized for excessive use of the square in its decoration. Virasoro also built a number of non-rhetorical urban buildings in Buenos Aires, such as the Banco El Hogar Argentino (1926), calle B. Mitre, and the Casa del Teatro (1927), Avenida Santa Fé. Perhaps most notable, however, were his early contributions to social housing, using prefabricated components to achieve simple geometrical forms, as in La Continental housing development (1929) at Banfield, Buenos Aires Province.

• Virasoro, Alejandro
  • Argentina, §II, 3: Architecture, after c 1920