Tuesday · August · 11 · 2026
“We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.”
— John F. Kennedy
Sun & daylight
The sun rises at 07:39 and sets at 18:20 in Buenos Aires today, giving 10h 41m of daylight. Solar noon is at 13:00.
07:39
Sunrise
13:00
Noon
18:20
Sunset
Midnight
01:00
Sunrise
07:39
Solar noon
13:00
Sunset
18:20
Solar midnight
01:00
Daylight
10h 41m
Daylight runs about 9h 49m around the June solstice and 14h 28m around the December solstice.
Daylight saving time
Buenos Aires does not observe daylight saving time. Clocks stay on UTC−3 all year, so the local time never shifts with the seasons.
Public holidays
Argentina has 1 public holiday in August 2026.
Architecture
Buenos Aires was built by European immigration onto a flat grid with no natural edges except the river, and its architects imported whatever style the decade favoured. The strongest local work came after the war, in concrete.
Completed 2015
Norman Foster
The city government's headquarters, built in Parque Patricios in the south rather than in the centre where every previous administration had sat. Foster covered the block with a canopy of shallow concrete barrel vaults on slim pillars, carried past the glass to shade the entrance. The offices are terraced around a four-storey atrium, with louvres screening the east and west faces. Moving fifteen hundred staff into a district with no reason to attract them was the project, and the building had to be worth the journey.
Opened 1992
Clorindo Testa · Francisco Bullrich · Alicia Cazzaniga
The national library in Recoleta, on the grounds of the demolished presidential residence. The team won the competition in 1961, construction did not start until 1971, and it opened in 1992: the reading rooms sit on four concrete piers above the treetops with the stacks buried below, which keeps the park intact and puts the readers in the canopy. The delay is legible in the concrete, which changed character between design and pour. It took a generation and outlived two of its three architects.
Completed 1966
Clorindo Testa · SEPRA
A bank headquarters on a corner in the financial district, won in competition in 1959. Testa and SEPRA hung perforated concrete panels away from the structure for a deep outer layer, then opened the interior into one volume where the floors are suspended platforms rather than storeys. The street shows through the screen from inside. It is the most recognisable Argentine building of the century, and it treats a bank as an open room rather than a vault.
Completed 1936
Gregorio Sánchez · Ernesto Lagos · Luis María de la Torre
An apartment building on Plaza San Martín, commissioned by Corina Kavanagh with an inheritance. The three architects stripped the elevations of ornament and stepped the mass back in symmetrical tiers, each recess calibrated to bring light and air to the flats behind it, and built the whole thing in reinforced concrete in about fourteen months. No two apartments in it are identical. Rationalism reached here almost as early as it did in Europe, and it came as luxury housing rather than social reform.
Completed 1923
Mario Palanti
An office building on Avenida de Mayo, laid out as a reading of Dante's Divine Comedy. Palanti divided twenty-two floors into hell below, purgatory in the offices and heaven under a lighthouse, gave the building a hundred metres for the poem's hundred cantos, and set nine vaulted arches in the lobby for the circles of the Inferno. The lighthouse was built to signal its twin in Montevideo across the estuary. It is an office block organised entirely by a poem, and it still rents offices.