The historical building of Instituto de Botánica Darwinion in San Isidro: the silent message of Dr. Cristóbal M. Hicken’s legacy. EL EDIFICIO HISTÓRICO DEL INSTITUTO DE BOTÁNICA DARWINION DE SAN ISIDRO: EL MENSAJE SILENCIOSO DEL LEGADO DEL DR. CRISTÓBAL M. HICKEN

POZNER, R.; CÁPULA, F.; COUSO, G.; BLANCO, G.

DARWINIANA

INSTITUTO DE BOTÁNICA DARWINION

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2023 vol. 11 p. 180 - 245

0011-6793

The Instituto de Botánica Darwinion (CONICET and ANCEFyN) was founded by the end of 1910in the San Martín district by Cristóbal María Hicken as his private botanical research laboratory. Itsname honors Charles Darwin for his brilliant theory of biological evolution. In 1924, Cristóbal M.Hicken made public his desire to bequeath the Instituto de Botánica Darwinion to the National State, afact that only materialized in 1934. But in the early ‘30s, he decided to move the Instituto de BotánicaDarwinion to a new building located in the San Isidro district, built especially to contain the instituteand also his retirement home. After 87 years of existence and five building extensions, the historicbuilding of the Instituto de Botánica Darwinion of San Isidro maintains its integrity and attracts theattention of both the public and architecture and design professionals. Based on the study of buildingcharacteristics and the thought of Cristóbal M. Hicken, the main objective of this work is to evaluatewhether the external and internal structure of the historic Darwinion building in San Isidro, together withthe ornamentation and distribution of original functions of each room, respond only to an aesthetic andfunctional design or if, in addition, they have a symbolic meaning, a vision of the world, a silent messagefor those who want (and know how) to understand. With this central purpose as a guide, we carried out amultidisciplinary investigation to reconstruct Cristóbal M. Hicken’s vision in the design of the Institutode Botánica Darwinion of San Isidro. We started from the analysis of the original building in the SanMartín district in search of any possible design background, to then focus the attention entirely on thebuilding in San Isidro. Plans, public documents, correspondence, historical photographs, academic anddissemination articles of the time, pre-Hispanic South American ethnographic information, Argentinehistorical information between 1860 and 1930, and interviews with relatives and historians were studied.In short, the Instituto de Botánica Darwinion in San Isidro was created as a museum and a laboratoryplus a home. The design of the museum agrees with the concept of “temple of Botany” manifestedby Cristóbal M. Hicken himself, and whose first sign is observed in the etymology of the name ofthe institute. Its ornamentation is eclectic, since it combines symbols of Andean pre-Hispanic cultureswith symbols of Western civilization, and it is structured according to each room (portal, front rooms,herbarium, library) and orientation (towards the street or towards the inner garden). This ornamentationworks like a discourse in symbolic key with multiple messages for the visitor: it reflects an original,foundational, and ancient Argentine identity, which in turn communicates that the Darwinion is a placewhere a silent and fertile unveiling of the knowledge, of the secrets of evolution, takes place protectedfrom evils and misfortunes by Nature itself. The design plan of the institute, the portal, the accessterrace, and the internal garden convey desirable masonic values through the symbolic language, typicaland traditional of Freemasonry. Likewise, we show evidence of Dr. Cristóbal M. Hicken’s great interestin Andean pre-Hispanic cultures, of his refined knowledge of Greco-Roman mythology, his belonging toArgentine Freemasonry and consequent ability to symbolic language, and his knowledge of construction, cosmology, and analytic geometry. For these reasons, and considering his participation in the supervisionof the building work declared by the newspapers of his time, the probable direct intervention of CristóbalM. Hicken is proposed both in the design of the building of the Instituto de Botánica Darwinion of SanIsidro, as well as in the design of its ornamentation. In addition, evidence is provided of the possibleintervention of Arturo Prins and Fernando de Estrada in the project of the building.