Transparency of an opaque surface Juan O’Gorman’s Central Library at the University of Mexico Juan Manuel Heredia
t he Central Library at the University of Mexico is 50 years old this year. Finished in 1953 as part of the new university campus, the building still serves its original purpose despite an increasingly cramped interior; Its once spacious reading room has been progressively reduced in area by stacks that were originally meant to remain in its (box-like) upper structure. In any event the interior space was never intended to be as important as the exterior: the mosaic covering the building has remained a powerful motif throughout the years.This autochthonously- dressed library was for a long time (and before the work of Luis Barragan was ‘discovered’ in the mid-seventies) the symbol of Mexican architectural modernism.Through it not only the campus acquired a central figure that consciously inverted the logic of the surrounding — mostly transparent — school buildings, but also the city and the country found a paradigmatic new centre that expressed its mid- century nationalism. Fifty years later some may think of the building as an exercise on architectural vulgarity. The declared nationalism and modernism that prompted the project attest to a world gone by. Mexico and its architectural culture has become less chauvinistic in its claims; it has either turned to the more abstract and subtler regionalism of Barragan or to a search for high-tech and neo-avant-garde architecture. The building may have appeared dated even at the time of its construction as use of its figurative technique didn’t reflect the abstract teachings of the then pictorial avant-garde. Juan O’Gorman was indeed more of a realist painter than an architect. He belonged to the school of artists, muralists and communists led by Diego Rivera, whose nationalistic bias was very straightforward and often dogmatic. And yet, despite its
evident rhetoric, the building’s surface still has the ability to speak on a civic level.
The four mosaic murals are devoted to the history of Mexico: the Pre-Columbian and European ‘worlds’ occupy the two large front areas while the sides depict the recent revolutionary past and a progressive ideal future. The murals consist of a matrix of one-meter square prefabricated panels made out of natural-colored stones brought from all regions of the country. Each panel was laid out horizontally and later transferred to its vertical position. The Library was transformed into a giant book, a codex that allowed for close and distant readings, announcing its programmatic function. The opacity of the mosaic acts here as a transparent agent. The most prominent side, the northern one, depicting the history of European civilization as it emerged victorious over the native one, acquires. from a distance. an ambiguous message. As one looks from farther away the ‘story’ recedes to reveal a conscious abstraction of a masked Aztec figure. Carrying such rhetorical devices the materiality of the surface, carefully built and impeccably kept, and the way the building is sited are its most secure and enduring aspects.
Juan Manuel Heredia is an architect from Mexico City who studied at the Universidad Iberoamericana. He teaches architectural design in Mexico’s National University and is now doing graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
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O n S ite review
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I ssue 9 2003
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