Mario Palanti studied painting at the Brera Academy and architecture at the Milan Polytechnic before arriving in Argentina in 1909, where he first worked in the office of Arturo Prins and Oskar Ranzenhofer on the neo-Gothic law faculty in Buenos Aires. On his own account he built a run of extravagantly decorated apartment houses along Avenida Rivadavia from 1913, the Hotel Castelar on Avenida de Mayo, and the South American head office of the Banco Francés e Italiano. His two towers — the Palacio Barolo in Buenos Aires and its Montevideo twin, the Palacio Salvo — carried reinforced concrete higher than anything else on the River Plate and made him famous. Spanish Wikipedia describes his manner as brushing against Art Nouveau and Art Deco while remaining, in the end, an idiom of his own. He returned to Milan and died there in 1978.
