the metropolitan infographic centre Bridging Strata Mexico’s Arquine magazine launched their ninth annual interna- tional competition (2007) for the design of a Metropolitan Info- graphics Centre in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district of the Mexico City. The Infographics Centre will house both temporary exhibits and permanent collections ranging from pre-Columbian codices, to colonial and revolutionary cartograph- ic documents, to modern and contemporary infrastructural maps.
projects | collections tlateloco mexico by farid j noufaily + gregory mckay perkins
topography memorials markets plazas technology
This project was attractive to our team due to opportunities afforded by the rich historic and geographic context of the site. As it stands today, the ruins of an Aztec temple occupy the westernmost and lowest level of the site, the church of Santiago Tlatelolco and its adjoining monastery are to the south, adjacent and coplanar to the plaza, and surrounding the site to the north and east are the remnants of Mexico’s Modernist period with housing projects by, among others, the prominent Mexican architect Mario Pani, a student of Le Corbusier, and the former Foreign Ministry Tower by Pedro Ramirez Vazquez. Finally, the plaza proper is also the site of the 1968 Mexican Olympics student massacre. Research into the Aztec foundations of Mexico City with its infrastructure of canals, chinampas (floating farms) and markets revealed that Tlatelolco was the central marketplace of the Aztec empire. Tlatelolco was also the birthplace of modern day Mexico; it was here that the Aztecs made their last stand against Cortez and the Spanish conquistadors. The violent transformations of Spanish colonisation are architecturally embodied on the site by the destruction of the Aztec temples and the incorporation of their ruins into the colonial cathedral of Santiago Tlatelolco — it is a fascinating metamorphosis, akin to the Byzantine re-use of Greek and Roman ruins. On October 2nd, 1968 the Plaza de las Tres Culturas was the final destination of a student demonstration against a dictatorial Mexican régime. The demonstrators had been diverted from their intended staging grounds at the National Autonomous University by a strong military presence. Having paraded through the streets during the day, the student demonstrators gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, when they were surrounded by armoured cars and tanks. The police and military fired into the crowd, killing both student demonstrators and bystanders. Disputed accounts report between 200 and 3000 casualties (the range due to official and unofficial accounts and the removal of bodies in garbage trucks by the Mexican military to unknown burial sites). In 1993 a stele was erected in the plaza, memorialising the twenty officially-acknowledged victims of the massacre.
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On Site review 20: archives and museums
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