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Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-4379919

1527-1900

Styliane Philippou,

Agriculture and Social Issues

The novelty of Modern Architecture in Mexico City lies in the way that it approaches its subject. Kathryn E. O'Rourke tells the story of key works of Mexican modernism, which sought to forge a nationally distinct language of architecture, entwined with the story of the contemporary construction of a continuously evolving narrative of a national architectural history undertaken by many of the same designers discussed. O'Rourke demonstrates how the state-commissioned historicist remaking of the buildings around the Zócalo—begun at the end of the paz porfiriana and completed in the 1930s—initiated the parallel processes of inventing a national architectural history and a modern national architecture. Emphatically displayed on facades, the characteristics of the monumental space that architects produced were more consistent with early twentieth-century histories of Mexican colonial architecture—imagined as nationally specific—than with the inherited Zócalo.Scholarly identification of indigenous influences on colonial architecture legitimized neocolonial architecture for Mexico, officially described in 1917 as a mestizo nation, while more inclusive accounts of Mexican culture in the 1920s and muralists such as Diego Rivera further diversified national sources. The examination of Carlos Obregón Santacilia's Mexican Pavilion at the 1922 international exhibition in Rio de Janeiro and his Ministry of Health headquarters in Mexico City (built from 1925 to 1929), as well as Juan Segura's workers' park (1929), reinforces O'Rourke's argument regarding the critical role of the facade in Mexico's modern architecture, which mobilized visual representation to advance the postrevolutionary government's project of a national cultural renaissance before domestic and international audiences. Wall surfaces functioned as giant billboards on which cultural mestizaje was practiced anew by architects, muralists, and sculptors who mixed allusions to Mexico's native and popular cultures and nationalized colonial past with international classical and modern styles to convey the continuity of national tradition as well as progress and modernity, along with the government's intention to integrate the indigenous population, especially recent immigrants to the capital, into civilized society.O'Rourke shows how Mexican pioneers of rationalism involved with government-sponsored, socially engaged building programs in the 1930s linked their rejection of historicism and preference for Corbusian functionalism to social reform and industrial modernization while employing native vegetation and materials, especially volcanic rock, and vibrant color to nationalize their buildings. The cover of the Ministry of Education's 1933 Escuelas primarias brings to mind Red Vienna's and New Frankfurt's publications on their socialist building programs, while the image of Juan O'Gorman's Xochimilco school, built in the atrio of a sixteenth-century church, recalls the photograph published by Italian art critic Pietro Maria Bardi, one year earlier, of a school by Patroklos Karantinos built at the foot of the Athenian Acropolis. Such photographs, as O'Rourke argues, “made visible the dilemma modern architects faced in designing new buildings literally in the shadows of extraordinary historical works” (p. 205). In the spirit of Le Corbusier's juxtapositions of automobiles and classical temples, these Mexican images also proclaimed that the works of Walter Gropius and Leon Battista Alberti shared a common origin with early colonial churches.Continuity rather than rupture was also asserted by the team tasked at midcentury with designing the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) campus (1948–53), even though, as O'Rourke explains, the ensemble also revealed uncertainty about national expression by researching new methods of relating to historical buildings and indigenous culture, which varied from the historically evocative to the abstract. As a whole, the campus, inserted in the barren volcanic landscape of the Valley of Mexico, reaffirmed recognizably national representation—denounced by modernist orthodoxy—most forcefully through giant, figurative facade mosaics. The book's fruitful discussions of facades demonstrate the bias that has led to the ostracizing of these architects from canonical accounts of architectural modernism and partly explains Mexico's relegation to the margins of such global narratives.O'Rourke shows how even the blank street facade of Luis Barragán's own introspective house of 1947 testifies to modern Mexican architects' persistent preoccupation with representation—in this case, self-representation—and facades. His high walls at once conceal and invite the observer to explore his manipulation of colored surfaces to produce affective space. The international popularity of Barragán's works for their Mexicanness stripped of political associations, despite his disavowal of the problematic construct of a national architecture, exposed the fundamental paradox of this long-pursued ambition.As its author admits, “Modern Architecture in Mexico City in some respects reads as a series of case studies” (p. 21). Their selection produces a coherent argument about the privileging of national history in Mexican modernism. But the focus on architectural historiography and national imagery as a source of architectural inspiration and a tool of interpretation has also resulted in a blind spot. In the catalog of the 1955 New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition Latin American Architecture since 1945, Henry-Russell Hitchcock observed that it was Mexico City's skyline that attracted North American tourists' attention. He noted Mexican architects' preoccupation with continuity with the past but presented the UNAM campus and Barragán's house together with International Style glass-fronted office blocks and Félix Candela's concrete shell vaults; had these been acknowledged in O'Rourke's book, they may have created a more nuanced picture of modern architecture in Mexico City in the first half of the twentieth century and its sources.