Buenos Aires en tinta china (1951): Between the Poetics of Image and the Poetics of Urban Architecture

Buenos Aires en tinta china (1951): entre poética de la imagen y poética de la arquitectura urbana

Abstract

The article analyzes Buenos Aires en tinta china (1951) –a book of drawings by Attilio Rossi conceived in dialogue with eight texts by Rafael Alberti– as a site of intersection between a poetics of the image and a poetics of urban architecture. Produced through an artistic collaboration in exile, the volume takes shape as a hybrid device in which word and image converge in a joint construction of the city. Drawing on the notion of ekphrasis and theories of the cultural production of urban space, the work is interpreted as a practice that goes beyond mere illustration, transforming Buenos Aires into a cognitive and memorial experience. Through Rossi’s lines, Alberti’s writing organizes facades, balconies, and thresholds as mediations between subject and public space. Thus, the city emerges as a sensitive archive where memory, perception, and exile overlap, revealing that the poetic can function as a form of knowledge and a symbolic elaboration of dwelling.