Caseros Prison was demolished 21 years after its opening. It took 15 months of mechanical work to bring down the 22-storey building. A dynamite implosion was aborted to prevent the toxic dust cloud from contaminating the neighbouring hospitals. Caseros was designed as a shortterm remand prison but instead it housed convicts serving their time. Inmates demanded what its architecture could not offer. Consequently, in May 1984, prisoners had their cell gates permanently opened to the corridors. Keys stopped being an instrument of power. A highly orchestrated riot marked the beginning of the inmates’ “DIY” architectural transformation of the prison to achieve their desired spatial conditions. The destruction of one system was the construction of another.

Boquetes (holes) were made in facades to talk to the city. Prisoners climbed like spider-men from hole to hole. Architecture was transformed into an enemy of surveillance rather than serving its primary role as a Panopticon. While the prison system attempts to transform human conduct through architecture, Caseros represents the antithesis: the transformation of architecture through human conduct.

The “Productos Caseros” exhibition focuses on the boquete as the most notorious “product” resulting from Caseros’s DIY transformation. A video displays the two faces of Caseros’s facade as it is hammered to create a boquete, exploring the wall’s material performance. A series of 1:1 photographs shows Buenos Aires as viewed and framed by various boquetes. An original boquete made by inmates is saved from Caseros’s demolition. Video footage documents the seven-hour “surgical” operation to extract a 2x2 metre wall section containing the boquete. Paradoxically, a “void” is the most relevant element to preserve. A video documents Buenos Aires using the preserved boquete as a lens while being transported throughout the city. Residential projects, a park, a school and a cultural centre are planned for Caseros’s former site. More importantly, its 64,000 m3 of demolition material was transformed, as land infill, into a new coastal park. Gaspar Libedinsky