Borges as Architecture Critic: A Forgotten Side of the Writer

Forty years after his death on June 14, 2026, Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires, 1899 – Geneva, 1986) is being reexamined not only as a literary giant but as an unexpected architecture critic. A 2025 book by Estela Canto, his close friend, reveals the fragile man behind the myth. In 1967, Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares wrote the fictional Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, where they satirized modern architecture through invented figures like Adam Quincey and Alessandro Piranesi. Borges admired Frank Lloyd Wright and visited the newly opened Guggenheim Museum in New York, describing its descending circular ramp as a slow decline akin to his own blindness. The article, published on Artribune, argues that Borges's amateur architectural criticism was pure, innocent, and free from professional constraints, as Walter Benjamin noted.