in general terms, by its spatial monumentality, capable of relegating simple details and unsophisticated materials to the background, TEN Arquitectos has been characterized by inverting this situation, by prioritizing structural aspects". The service building for Televisa is proposed as an iconic object that identifies with the television company's image and logo, to which the surrounding buildings also belong. In response to a disparate program and its location in the dense city center, an elliptical, metallic shell - a simple container for complex programs - defines a continuous space under which all activities take place. With this First Latin American Mies van der Rohe Award, the internationalist current of contemporary Mexican architecture consolidated the leadership and effort of an entire generation during the last decade of the last century. Among the emerging offices, Alberto Kalach's stands out. His buildings are radical responses from the geometry of their floor plans and the cutouts in their walls to permeate the in- terior spaces with light. Kalach understands architecture as a point of reference in the framework that articulates the urban landscape. Thus, each building is a piece, a partition, of the great collective work of architecture that is created over time. His structures elude the obvious, the predictable. His most spectacular and controversial work is the Vasconcelos Library. 13 The project, which won an international competition, bets on the dual condition of the building and botanical garden. It would seem that the symbiosis between nature and construction would relegate the new cultural infrastructure to a discreet urban event. However, the large scale of the complex makes it a decisive urban piece. An extensive concavity 250 meters long by 30 meters high lets light penetrate through the sloping walls and the ceiling, from which hang the clusters of shelves with all their books. On the outside, the horizontal scales and the saw-toothed roof protect the reading rooms from direct sunlight while bathing them in light. Timeless and schematic as a ruin, the building is indiffer- ent to the currents of recent years that advocated lightness, transparency, and tension in the skin. In the gravity of its bare walls, one can perceive the effort of its muscles, the work of the tensors from which the shelves hang. From the serial spaces of the side reading rooms, the totality is perceived. The floor plan of the building is the map of the library, the support of cartography of knowledge that, as in the great enlightenment projects, reflects the encyclopedic desire to understand and organize both the container and its contents. Global Plurality The 20th century began at the moment when Mexican archi- tecture incorporated the radical and austere language of the Modern Movement, with the studies of Diego Rivera and Frida Kalho that Juan O'Gorman projected in the best Corbusian purism and had its best moment with the syncretism between modernity and Mexican idiosyncrasy that Luis Barragán con- tributed to world culture, without forgetting the incorporation of the great typological contributions of Mario Pani -l' Únité
TEN Arquitectos led the third path of Mexican architecture at the end of the 20th century and represented the internationalist avant-garde in a relatively conservative context. Richard Ingersoll said that "if Mexican architecture can be identified, in general terms, by its spatial monumentality, capable of relegating simple details and unsophisticated materials to the background, TEN Arquitectos has been characterized by inverting this situation, by prioritizing structural aspects".
13 Adriá, Miquel. Excerpt from the essay The Ark and the Garden, Vas- concelos Library. Conaculta/INBA 2007, p. 76 to 95
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Movimiento Moderno / Modern Movement
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