Eguren's Lima

Over on that other site (Facebook) I posted an album titled Beaux Arts Lima--all buildings. Of course everyone talks about the Teatro Colon (Buenos Aires), the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City), but who talks about the over-the-top stylings of Lima's age of expansion? Paris had been redesigned and Barcelona's new modernista suburbs laid out by the time of the post-War of the Pacific building boom breached central Lima's ring wall (which in any case was less of a container of the physical city than of the field of power) and spilled madly into the pebbly agricultural lands, formerly inhabited by descendants of slaves, washerwomen, water sellers, ne'er-do-wells, and the occasional barefoot Franciscan. Big avenues were planned and paved, with circular plazas such as the Plaza Bolognesi where monuments to military heroes towered.

Most of these buildings are NOT well cared for--maybe "destroyed" would be a better descriptor. But they are beautiful buildings. They have a quality of exaggeration about them which I have to ascribe, however unwillingly, to the fact that they occupy an extreme end point (both physically and temporally) in the civic register of Belle Epoque buildings.

I'm still considering the twenties Belle Epoque because really Deco, although it did reach Lima, didn't have a huge impact. These buildings coincide exactly with the poetry of José María Eguren, that late fruit, man-out-of time, who went on writing exquisite modernista miniatures in the the age of Mariátegui and Vallejo. Another case-in-point, the Pabellón Morisco built in the Parque de la Exposición in 1921 as part of the centenial celebrations.