Soccer World Cup 78: Politics and technique in the construction of the Ciudad de Mendoza stadium (Argentina)

Abstract

In 1966, Argentina was designated as the venue for the 78 Soccer World Cup. Although the definition and the project predate the military coup, the sporting event was used as a tool to divert attention from the political and social context that the country went through during the last dictatorship. civic-military, for which no financial or technical resources were spared. In the province of Mendoza, the planning process for the World Cup stadium had begun after it was declared a sub-venue. This work was added to a series of interventions in CABA and Rosario, Mar del Plata and Córdoba. But in 1975, the project on which local architects were working left the provincial orbit: the national government, through the National Commission for Support of the World Cup, placed it in the hands of the MSGSSV studio. In disciplinary terms, this meant the recapture of public works management on a national scale. Thus, the cycle of “growing technical autonomy” that some provinces had achieved with respect to the works that were carried out in their territory was broken, even when the financing was extra-provincial. We are interested in working on the ideation and execution conditions of the Ciudad de Mendoza stadium, located in the capital of the homonymous province, establishing the role that the Architecture and Planning Department played before its separation from the project; the interaction between the different technical teams and the civil-military commands and how the symbolic capital of the agents involved in the authorship of the project operated.