Argentina built one of the most striking and costly buildings in the foreign section. It was bold French Renaissance on a steel frame, with a commanding dome, stained glass, and a portico whose curving entablature rested on caryatids. The architect Eduardo Sauze came from Argentina, with A. Huguier as associate and Julio Semillosa assisting in San Francisco. It cost about $200,000 to build and another $20,000 to furnish, even though sixty-three cases of plaster ornament were lost off Pernambuco when German raiders took or sank the British ship carrying them.
The pavilion had about 30,000 square feet of floor. Its best feature was a small theater Todd compared to a miniature opera house, where moving pictures showed the life of the whole country. A foyer of dioramas surrounded it, and upstairs were a gallery, a library and a reading room with newspapers in many languages. The tenor Florencio Constantino sang in the theater at the dedication on April 20, 1915.
