Buenos Aires House of Culture

The Buenos Aires House of Culture is an architectural landmark in the Montserrat section of the Argentine capital.

The outmoded headquarters of what was then Argentina's second-largest newspaper, La Prensa, led its influential proprietor in 1894, José Clemente Paz, to purchase a 1300 m² (14,000 ft²) lot on the newly opened Avenida de Mayo, and he commissioned local architects Carlos Agote and Alberto Gainza to design a new headquarters at the site. Agote and Gainza, both graduates of the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, drew from their training in Paris to create a Beaux-Arts design, beginning with a façade inspired by French architect Charles Garnier.

Completed in 1898, the new La Prensa offices was inaugurated in a ceremony attended by around 20,000. The Beaux-Arts exterior is notable also for its spire, which is topped by a gilt bronze monument to freedom of the press represented by Pallas Athena and created by French sculptor Maurice Bouval (of Thibaut Frères). Bouval's Athena stands 50 m (164 ft) above the ground and holds an electric lamp representing Prometheus' sacred fire.

The spire also contains a siren, installed in 1900 to symbolically herald news La Prensa considered singular milestones. The siren has been rung five times over the decades: on news of the assassination of Umberto I, the King of Italy, in 1900; on the landing of the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the moon; on the Argentine National Football Team's first FIFA World Cup, in 1978; on the invasion of the Falkland Islands by the last dictatorship, in 1982; and on the return of democracy with the inaugural of President Raúl Alfonsín, in 1983.

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