Floralis Genérica

On Avenida Figueroa Alcorta, in the middle of an open plaza and next to the UBA Law School, a metal flower some 20 meters tall stands in a reflecting pool. This is the Floralis Genérica, and it was designed to do what a real flower does: open with the morning light and close when it gets dark. Its story is also about how hard it is to keep a machine like this running out in the open.

A gift from Eduardo Catalano

It was designed by Eduardo Catalano, an Argentine architect trained at the University of Buenos Aires who spent almost his entire career in the United States. He taught at MIT for two decades, from 1956 to 1977, and designed the Juilliard School building at Lincoln Center in New York.

When he was already past eighty, Catalano gave the flower to his city. It was unveiled on April 13, 2002, in Plaza de las Naciones Unidas. It has six petals of stainless steel and aluminum and weighs about 18 tons. Catalano died in 2010.

A flower that follows the sun

Movement was the whole idea. Beneath the fountain, a hydraulic pump drives a piston, and the petals are hinged: when the piston pushes, they open, and when it pulls, they close. A system of photoelectric cells tracked the daylight, to mimic what botanists call photonasty, the movement of plants in response to light.

The plan was to open it in the morning and close it at nightfall, every day. There were exceptions: it stayed open all night on May 25, a national holiday; on September 21, the first day of spring here; on Christmas Eve, on New Year’s Eve and on full-moon nights. And it closed on its own in strong winds, because open petals can be damaged by the wind.

It got off to a rough start. Since it was one of a kind, there was no prototype to test it on first, and on opening day the petals wouldn’t close. The mechanism took two months of adjusting, and it wasn’t until June 2002 that the flower closed for the first time.

Twenty years of repairs

In 2009 a storm broke the mechanism, and the flower went years without moving. In 2015 the City brought it back, with technical advice from the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, the national technological university, after more than six months of work. It opened and closed again, but operated by hand, no longer automatically as Catalano had intended.

The hardest blow came with the storms of December 2023 and March 2024, which left it with two fallen petals. Each one weighs more than three tons. In January 2025 they were taken to an industrial workshop in Baradero, in Buenos Aires Province. There they were taken apart, stripped of rust, checked with non-destructive testing and reassembled with new parts.

They came back by water: each petal traveled more than 150 kilometers by barge along the Paraná River and the Río de la Plata to the port of Buenos Aires, and from there by truck to the plaza, in an operation that took about three days. The first was mounted in October 2025 and the last in December. That work was on the structure. Whether the petals move again, and how, is something that has changed several times over these years: don’t go just for the movement.

How to see it

The best thing is to walk all the way around the reflecting pool. The flower changes from every side: from the front, the petals stand out against the sky; from the side you see the stem and how each petal is hinged to the base. And in the still water there’s the reflection, the classic Floralis photo.

For that shot, go when the sun is low, early in the morning or at sunset, when the steel takes on the color of the sky. At night the flower is lit up, and it’s worth coming back if you’re nearby.

Planning your visit

• Allow a quarter of an hour, or a little longer if you sit in the plaza for a while.
• The plaza is open to everyone. What changes is the state of the flower; for that, check the City’s tourism website.
• Figueroa Alcorta is a fast avenue: cross at the light, even if it looks like nothing’s coming.
• The UBA Law School is next door. The National Museum of Fine Arts and Plaza Francia are a few blocks away, and the Recoleta Cemetery a little farther on.

Last checked October 2026.