Our Latin American cities lack very much a sense of urban space. In 1979 I was asked to work for the city of Cordoba. Cordoba, in Argentina where I live, is the second largest city with one million people. The sort of actions that I undertook in the city were based on a range of principles and philosophical ideas to try to make the city more of a city, understanding it as the ultimate cultural product.

The starting point became exactly the place where the city started in the Colonial times in the 16th Century, and this is the Plaza de Armas (the Arms Square) where I intended to pedestrianalise and to change it into a real urban place of gathering, of celebration of the monuments in front of it — that is, the ancient city hall and the cathedral. Both buildings were projected as a facade on the square, making a sort of an accent, and you know that in Spanish, as in many other languages, accents do not accentuate themselves but the letter that is underneath. So the whole idea was to accentuate, to give a different sort of reading to the same facade or the same buildings, historical buildings we were trying to celebrate.