Water building
This is Buenos Aires’s Water Palace, a fantastic structure of over 300,000 lustrous, multicolored faience bricks made by Royal Doulton and shipped from Britain. Its original interior engineering components were made in various countries, with Belgium as the largest contributor. Originally, the Water Palace was meant to be a humble building, constructed as a response to the yellow fever epidemic that hit San Telmo and other neighborhoods in Buenos Aires in 1877. In the days before plumbing, drinking water was held in collecting pools in individual homes, which helped to spread the disease. Alarmed, the city began looking for a spot to construct new, sanitary facilities to prevent another outbreak. As this was the highest point in the city, meaning water stored here could use gravity to flow down the pipes into residences, this location was chosen for the water tower.
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February 5th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
Beautiful structure…interesting that it’s actually called the water building
February 6th, 2006 at 11:46 am
I agree with you. I still need to figure out if they provide guided tours of the building. In which case, I’ll go and take some more pictures.