The building
The Galeria Guemes: the building and its stories
A 1915 concrete skyscraper with a tango theatre in it, and the writers who lived and worked inside it before the show ever existed.
Check dates and prices ↗The Guemes, at a glance
| Detail | |
|---|---|
| Address | Florida 165, Buenos Aires (between Florida and San Martin streets) |
| Architect | Francesco Gianotti |
| Commissioned / opened | 1913 / December 1915 |
| Style | Art Nouveau, reinforced concrete |
| Notable resident | Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 1931 |
A tower over a shopping arcade
The Galeria Guemes isn't really one building so much as two stacked together: a long, glass-roofed shopping arcade at street level running between Florida and San Martin streets, with a roughly 14-storey tower rising above it. Italian architect Francesco Gianotti was commissioned in 1913 and the building opened in December 1915, built almost entirely in reinforced concrete — an unusual, expensive choice for Buenos Aires at the time, which is a large part of why it's still described today as the city's first concrete skyscraper.
Art Nouveau, not Beaux-Arts
Most of central Buenos Aires' grand early-20th-century buildings lean French Beaux-Arts — mansard roofs and stone facades modelled closely on Paris, the fashionable reference point for the city's wealthiest builders of the era. The Guemes is deliberately different: gilded ironwork, curved glass roof panels, and the ornamental bronze figures set over its entrances sit closer to the Art Nouveau arcades and department stores going up in Turin and Milan at the same moment, which tracks with Gianotti's own Piedmontese background rather than the era's usual Parisian template.
A writer's address, twice over
The arcade carries a literary history that predates any tango show by decades. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, later the author of The Little Prince, lived in an apartment inside the Guemes in 1931 while flying postal routes for Aeroposta Argentina between Buenos Aires and Patagonia — a stretch of his life he later drew on for Wind, Sand and Stars. Decades afterward, the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar folded the gallery into his own fiction, placing it alongside the great 19th-century arcades of Paris that recur throughout his work, an odd echo of Gianotti's own European reference points.
What the building actually holds
Beyond the ground-floor shops, the Guemes has at various points housed offices, apartments, a rooftop lookout over the microcentro's rooftops, and — most relevant here — two theatres tucked below street level. Teatro Astor Piazzolla, used for the Piazzolla programme, sits alongside a second room, Teatro Carlos Gardel, named for the other towering figure of Argentine tango; both stage their own nightly tango-and-dinner programmes, independently produced, cast and priced, and it's worth checking which room a ticket is actually for before booking.
What survives from 1915
The theatre used for the Piazzolla show carries visible features from the building's original Art Nouveau decoration — painted glass ceiling panels, gilded relief work and tiered private boxes along the walls, rather than a plain black-box room retrofitted for dinner theatre. It's this detail, as much as the programme itself, that makes the venue feel distinct from a purpose-built modern tango room elsewhere in the city, and worth a look upward between courses rather than only at the stage.
Finding it today
The Florida 165 entrance is the one to use for the tango show; the arcade itself is pedestrian, open to ordinary daytime foot traffic like any shopping street, and genuinely easy to walk past without realising a 110-year-old concrete tower and two working theatres sit behind its shopfronts. Look for the arched, gilded doorway rather than any theatre signage at street level.