The project was led by architects Enrique Del Moral and Mario Pani for the Master Plan and the Rectory Tower, with the participation of Augusto H. Álvarez for the Faculty of Letters building, José Villagrán for the School of Architecture, Félix Candela for the Cosmic Ray Pavilion, Juan O'Gorman for the Central Library, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez for the Faculty of Medicine, and Teodoro González de León for the Master Plan, among many others. La Ciudad Universitaria had to assume the contradiction of wanting to be modern and at the same time represent a national identity. Ornamentation and massiveness, which although rejected by the International Style as features of the preceding architecture that sought to transcend, were deeply rooted in the national cultural tradition. It was the strength of this tradition that imposed the participation of the plastic arts on the La Ciudad Universitaria, the presence of color, the play of textures and volumes, as well as massiveness, inflicting on the functionalist orthodoxy the most forceful flight. 11 In this way, Mexican artists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Carlos Mérida, concerned with the physical and historical context, transgressed the functionalist spirit by resorting to representative, metaphorical and symbolic murals. The murals, as in the ancient times of the codices, served as graphic representations of a cultural message. Although strongly criticized and even ridiculed, particularly by the Italian historian Bruno Zevi, who referred to them as the "Messican grotesque", these murals within the architecture of La Cuidad Universitaria had a social and aesthetic importance and a mission to fulfill. Rupture In the Three Cultures Plaza -the pre-Hispanic, the colonial, and the modern- one day in October 1968, the thread that articulated the history of Mexico was broken. An indiscriminate massacre put an end to the manifestations of popular discon- tent. Curiously, and perhaps not coincidentally, it happened in the new Tlatelolco neighborhood, designed by Mario Pani, very close to the Historic Center. This complex for 100,000 inhabitants, which evoked the Ville Radieuse, was the paradigm of the uncritical modernity of tall linear blocks, the same as many others in the metropolitan peripheries of the planet. The spirit of the times made no room for autochthonous in- flections, forgetting, as William Cutis says, that the ¨Mexican¨ identity is an ideological framework that has struggled with the problem of integrating the new and the old, the Hispanic and the pre-Hispanic, the center and the religion, the city, and the countryside, the cosmopolitan and the indigenous, the modern and the mestizo, the national and the international. 12 Afterward, history would resume its course from more critical and endogenous positions, while time and earth- quakes made a natural selection of these modern years of the mid-twentieth century, leaving only a few small masterpieces to emerge. Scavenging for Ashes Then came times that culminated in economic crises, devalua- tions, and the 1985 earthquake. The architecture of these years, in line with that of other Latin American countries, rummaged through memories and ashes, searching for signs of identity that were self-limited to vernacular references, from its formal, material, and constructive repertoire. Referents distilled from colonial and rural architecture as a sign of identity. The palette
Q Hotel Camino Real, Ricardo Legorreta. Q Camino Real Hotel, Ricardo Legorreta V Casa Luis Barragán, Luis Barragán. V Luis Barragan House, Luis Barragan.
Hurgando cenizas Siguieron tiempos que culminaron en crisis económicas, deva- luaciones y el temblor de 1985. La arquitectura de estos años, acorde con la de otros países latinoamericanos, hurgó entre los recuerdos y las cenizas, buscando signos de identidad que se autolimitaron a los referentes vernáculos, desde su repertorio formal, material y constructivo. Referentes destilados de la ar- quitectura colonial y rural como signo de identidad. La paleta de materiales recuperó el adobe, el tepetate, la cantera, los grandes muros y la madera, que apelaban a la memoria de las haciendas y a la arquitectura virreinal. Y desde el punto de vista constructivo, se dejaron de lado los grandes avances tecnológicos. A su vez, las consecutivas crisis económicas y sus conse- cuentes devaluaciones, como el aumento de la corrupción de un sistema predemocrático y unipartidista, propiciaron tanto el musculismo tardomoderno, como la nostalgia vernacular, dejando poco lugar al posmodernismo imperante. Al finalizar el siglo XX, el panorama oscilaba entre la ar- quitectura institucional y pesada de Teodoro González de León, los muros pintados y las torres metafísicas de Ricardo Legorreta, y los que buscaban una nueva manera de ver las cosas. Así, los arquitectos sembraron hitos en el magma informal de sus ciudades, que crecen según las presiones del liberalismo económico, el incremento demográfico y la corrupción, mientras que el país se seguía construyendo informalmente al margen de las obras de autor. Expresionismo corbusiano Algunos de los edificios civiles de Teodoro González de León y Abraham Zabludovsky llenaron el vacío histórico que te-
11 Vargas Salguero, Ramón. The Empire of Reason, Mexican Architecture in the 20th Century, Mexico 1994, p. 78 12 Curtis, William J.R. The General and the Local, Modernity, and Architecture in Mexico, the University of Texas Press 1997, p. 118
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