Born in Leonforte, Sicily, and brought to Argentina as a child, Francisco Salamone qualified as architect and civil engineer in 1920 after the Otto Krause technical school and universities in La Plata and Córdoba. His whole reputation rests on four years. Between 1936 and 1940, under the provincial administration of Manuel Fresco, he won contract after contract and put up more than sixty large public works in twenty-five municipalities of Buenos Aires Province: town halls with towers taller than the parish church, monumental cemetery portals and rationalist slaughterhouses, all in reinforced concrete and all several times the height of the low pampa towns around them. English Wikipedia describes the result as Art Deco functionalism crossed with Italian Futurism at vast scale. He left public work after 1940, was largely forgotten, and died in Buenos Aires in 1959.
