mañanarama

final

2011-10-09T18:47:00.000+02:00

This blog is no more. Visit Mañananarama in the afterlife on Tumblr.

intermission

2011-02-20T11:25:00.003+01:00

In the meantime, please visit Mañanarama on Tumblr.

i'm home

2010-12-16T18:40:00.000+01:00

cactus and sombrero

2010-10-15T09:56:00.002+02:00

Mexico:

Narcostate Mexico:

Designer Narcostate Mexico:

flight of the calder

2010-09-12T13:39:00.014+02:00

The dashing Pablo León de la Barra has a great series of posts on his latest trip to the homeland at the CFTAR blog.

The latest one features a series of before and afters of the Mexico City Camino Real Hotel (1968), detailing the tragic refitting of the interiors in NAFTA moderne style (paradoxically, by the original architect, Ricardo Legorreta, no less).

It's particularly disheartening to see a once stark and dramatic lobby that was presided over by an electric-orange spider-like Calder turned into a tacky snack bar.

Pablo reports that the sculpture was eventually auctioned at Christie's and sold to some Portuguese fellow with better taste and sense of historical and aesthetic merit than the sad lot of Mexican barons that now handle the hotel.

So goes modernity in Mexico.

fiberglass ambassadors

2010-09-07T06:12:00.003+02:00

Je ne passe jamais devant un fétiche de bois, un Boudha doré, une idole mexicaine sans me dire: C'est peut-être le vrai dieu.

Charles via Walter

lost

2010-09-02T17:47:00.006+02:00

How do you preserve what's already lost?

transition

2010-08-28T09:40:00.004+02:00

modern preserves

2010-08-24T07:36:00.007+02:00

"Preservation is not the enemy of modernity but actually one of its inventions."
Rem via David.

peace train

2010-08-07T12:39:00.008+02:00

The aestheticized infrastructure of the Revolución Pacífica.

old

2010-08-01T20:37:00.006+02:00

When I was growing up, the future was limitless possibility, jet-age, space-age techno-utopia. “Modern” meant new. Now, modern means old, and the future I grew up seems dated, irresponsible, obsolete. (Deborah Aschheim)

34 - 61

2010-07-22T18:02:00.005+02:00

burnout

2010-06-10T18:12:00.001+02:00

oh-woh baby

2010-05-27T19:31:00.007+02:00

I was unaware of the African-American Female Singing Norteño Covers on Youtube sub-genre.

rise

2010-05-27T11:37:00.004+02:00

I wonder how soon we'll be able not only to digitally store, but also resuscitate.

neglect

2010-05-24T13:06:00.002+02:00

Note to self: reflect on the value of neglect.

authoritarian representation

2010-05-20T17:19:00.002+02:00

Architecture as authoritarian representation.

sentimental

2010-05-19T09:54:00.005+02:00

How do we distinguish the historic from the sentimental?

left

2010-05-13T21:38:00.008+02:00

So little is left of so many things.

1965

2010-04-09T10:21:00.008+02:00

Luis Buñuel, Simon of the Desert. (1965)

More on The Desert, faith, technology, consumerism, gadgetry and endless-loop mutually dependent negative relationships:

Sam Jacob, "More Scenes in Cartoon Deserta". (2009)

Reyner Banham, "The Great Gizmo". (1965)

Footnote 1. Consider that while gadgets might fail consumer capitalism hasn't. Gadgets aren't only delivered everywhere anywhere: they are the means of delivering consumer culture, everywhere anywhere. The magical-mechanical coffin is only the medium.
Footnote 2. Modern Consumerist Cities as the ultimate Desert.

Footnote 3. Buñuel takes the fall of Simon as the fall of Heroic Modernisms. (Vid. Spain under Franco or Post-Revolutionary Mexico.) Consumer culture was the final nail on the coffin for Revolution. The calm of consumer culture conquers the scary wilderness of sociopolitical disruption.

#lgnlgn

rocky

2010-03-07T20:37:00.002+01:00

By the 1940s the expansion of the city made this relatively flat -- albeit very rocky -- area of interest to speculators, among whom was the architect and landscape gardner Luis Barragán...

(Whoa. First time I see someone refering to Barragán as a "speculator".)(Which makes him even more representative of Mexican modernist architecture.)

modern mexico city, 1942

2010-03-02T14:23:00.004+01:00

From James A. Fitzpatrick's "Traveltalks: The Voice of the Globe".

Via @andreslajous.

rootless

2010-02-25T18:26:00.003+01:00

"The rootless nature of Juárez is like a mold in the atmosphere." Alma Guillermoprieto

what

2010-02-13T10:51:00.003+01:00

Have to figure out what architecture in a place like Ciudad Juárez is exactly. For Monday.

juarez (and bette davis as empress carlota)

2010-02-08T19:47:00.002+01:00

there is more to modernist architecture in mexico than barragán

2010-01-31T12:59:00.007+01:00

And the new show on "Mexican Modernisms" --curated by José Castillo and Wonne Ickx-- at Bozar in weird and wonderful Brussels hopes to prove just that.

taxi!

2010-01-25T07:26:00.007+01:00

One of the things that really made me depressed when I was back in Mexico City for Christmas was the new designated color code for taxi cabs. Who came up with the hideous burgundy-gold combo? And what's with the gay Angel de la Independencia logo stenciled on the side?

The neon-green VW bugs that had become proper icons of DF shall be missed. If they had to redo the look of cabs, why not return to the unquestionably fabulous "cocodrilos" of yore?

greatest show on earth

2010-01-25T07:10:00.006+01:00

Toute la vie des sociétés dans lesquelles règnent les conditions modernes de production s'annonce comme une immense accumulation de spectacles.

estrellita

2010-01-20T20:50:00.008+01:00

The "Estrella Pronaf" building (Pronaf Star) in Piedras Negras, Coahuila --the main building of the local Pronaf and Puerta de México site, designed by Mario Pani and built in the early 1960s-- is slated to be demolished this month.

According to a local architect who is apparently in charge of a new redevelopment program in the area, the building doesn't correspond to the current "modern image" the city wants to project, and that through the demolition of the Pronaf and the inauguration of a new "Paseo del Río" riverwalk, the city will "automatically recover the tourism it has lost." (Uhm, yeah, I'm sure the problem was the Pronaf complex, not the narcoviolence or anything of the sort).

It's kind of ironic that this guy is using the exact same excuse the Pronaf did in its day, of "creating first-class, family-oriented, healthy tourist attractions" to counter the current trend of crossborder bar-hopping.

Again, Mexico proves it gives a rat's ass about its Modern heritage.

2010

2009-12-31T18:56:00.001+01:00

Happy ~~1968~~ 2010.

home for the holidays

2009-12-24T13:50:00.003+01:00

facial

2009-12-16T21:47:00.004+01:00

Stolen from the fabulous Angelo Plessas's Angelo Says, "Architecture and Portraiture" (Augustin Hérnandez, Heróico Colegio Militar, Mexico City, 1975).

mexican modern archicheese

2009-12-14T07:51:00.005+01:00

You have to be Mexican or at least hablar español to get a sense of the full-cheese wonder in this, but just the soundtrack might give you an idea. It's shocking to see how ghetto Mexican Modernity looked back in 1994. I wonder if these were shot before the crash.

zoom

2009-12-03T08:57:00.007+01:00

Zona Pronaf, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.

On my screen there is a ribbon of green parcels in the middle of the desert. The ribbon is cut through by a gray blob. I do a zoom-in, and distinguish the Rio Bravo/Grande, a couple of hills, dry land and the gray blob that is Ciudad Juárez. The river is in fact a fortified concrete canal. To the north, El Chamizal looks like an impacted wisdom tooth trying to grow out of the city. The park is dry. There is an abstract rounded monument sitting empty, baking under the sun (in the satellite view, the canal/river/border is also and abstract rounded monument of sorts). Ant-cars avoid the Chamizal like it was a big puddle of oil, bound for the South or the East. I follow them with my cursor. The Avenida Américas unwinds in bows and roundabouts. Empty lots, bus stops, parking spots. A 13ft-tall Abraham Lincoln stands alone in his tiny square. In the map, El Paso and Juárez are brought together by Francisco (Pancho) Villa and divided by Cuatro Siglos (Four Centuries). Further down, Pancho Villa becomes Juan Gabriel. (Here they’ve found a bunch of women’s bodies. The eje must be packed with pink crosses in real life.) On the other side of town, Av. Industrias becomes Jaime Bermúdez, in the middle you have Av. Panamericana, Lincoln and other more generic names:16 de Septiembre, Lic. Adolfo López Mateos… Back to the satellite view. Zoom-in. Eje Juan Gabriel is covered with white patches. So is Av. Bermúdez. The maquilas and warehouses. A little further down and to the right, the only real green patch in all of the city: the golf club where Don Jaime and his kids probably live. Zoom. A subdivision dotted with McMansions and swimming pools. Click to the left. I wonder where the Pueblo Amigo is. I can’t tell if there’s a shopping center that "resembles a traditional Mexican pueblo” or not. Another thing I don’t see are the “nuclear cemeteries”, or toxic waste dumps. I discover the Museum of Art and History, a fossil on the corner of the Plaza de las Américas’s parking lot, like some cheap, minor ornamental landscape feature. Under that gigantic white tank of a mall probably lie the remains of the Pronaf.

my first docomomo

2009-11-29T10:40:00.007+01:00

I will be attending my very first Docomomo conference --in Mexico City, no less-- next year. Very excited. Will be posting some of my notes on this here blog. My basic premise is Ciudad Juárez as model Modern City. Tasty, don't you think?

Let's begin with a little quote from Bolaño's 2666:

The city was very poor, with most streets unpaved and a sea of houses assembled out of scrap…they discovered rail lines and slum soccer fields surrounded by shacks, and they even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the terminally ill and a team of the starving to death, and there were two highways that led out of the city, and a gully that had become a garbage dump, and neighborhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and, sometimes, in the distance, the silhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the maquiladoras. The city, like all cities, was endless.

astray

2009-11-25T08:59:00.008+01:00

Peluso (Monument to the Stray Dog), Tlalpan, Mexico City.

The plaque reads:

My only crime is to have been born and living on the streets or being abandoned. I didn’t ask to be born, and despite your indifference and your beatings, the only thing I ask of you is whatever is left of your love. I don’t want to suffer anymore, surviving the world is only a matter of horror! Help me, please!

Peluso.

Via @la_britani.

tragedy

2009-11-25T07:32:00.005+01:00

Photo by Jaime Martínez

How is Mexico City different from other oceanic spaces? Amid the steam of tamale stalls, the smell of epazote, and the cries of street vendors, there's a sense of deferred tragedy, our preferred strategy for coping with chaos.

Juan Villoro, "The Metro".

suburban aesthetics

2009-11-17T21:07:00.006+01:00

House in El Pedregal (1951). Photo by Eliot Elisofon

Despite the historical persistence and consistency of critiques such as these, mocking uniformity, sneering at shoddy construction, and decrying the absence of taste (or worse), a substantive history of suburban aesthetics—the criteria according to which society has judged the design and appearance of suburban dwellings and landscapes—remains to be written.

John Archer, "Suburban Aesthetics is Not an Oxymoron"

emptied

2009-11-08T10:14:00.004+01:00

I like John Berger's synthesis of the role of the PRI in the history of twentieth-century Mexico:

And so I come to the point. The ravine between the vast field of broken promises and the popular expectations of more justice had somehow to be filled in, and the main political parties, beginning with the PRI (Party of the Institution of Revolution!), have carried this out for seventy years by making rubble of what had once been a political language. Broken promises, broken premises, broken propositions, broken laws. Every principle — except that of self-interest — was emptied of meaning.

comeback

2009-10-22T12:10:00.003+02:00

Dear all:

Real life has kept me terribly busy for the past couple of months. I apologize for the lack of posts here. I do hope to make a slow yet steady comeback.

Stay tuned.

wonder

2009-10-05T07:20:00.003+02:00

Mario Pani, Sketch for the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Plaza of the Three Cultures) project

Tlatelolco, Mexico City (ca. 1961)

I often wonder about the relationship between modernization and distortion.

thriller

2009-08-31T07:53:00.003+02:00

Contemporary participatory urbanism in Mexico City.

I can only think of Heriberto Yepez's affirmation:

"Mexico, a culture that now floats on nothing."

reminder

2009-08-25T08:55:00.005+02:00

Failure too should be preserved. As a reminder.

Reblog of myself three years ago.

atonement

2009-08-13T10:29:00.020+02:00

In the late 1990s, as the 70-year single-party rule of the PRI came close to crumbling apart, desperate architectural measures were taken to provide a fresh layer of self-legitimizing spatial balm. A common feature in the party's attempted expiatory landscape was the monument to Colosio, the officialist presidential candidate murdered while running for office in 1994, in the dusty hills on the outskirts of Tijuana.

The PRI loves monuments. The party was born out of the need to incorporate post-revolutionary dissidence and end bloodshed. Monumentalization was a great strategy. Once dead, anyone could fit into the great "Revolutionary Family" and have a statue dedicated to them.

"Plastic integration" (i.e. architectural pastiche incorporating various techniques —scuplture, muralism, etc.— and styles in a single project) is often considered one of the peculiar features of Mexican modernism. But another defining trait is political integration (or co-option). After all, architecture is also frozen (and usually falsified) politics.

resonance

2009-08-13T10:13:00.005+02:00

low-high--high-low -brow

notice

2009-07-31T19:58:00.003+02:00

Posting will resume shortly. Thank you.

culiacán

2009-06-29T08:45:00.014+02:00

This is lovely Culiacán Rosales, hometown of the Sinaloa Cartel and cradle of Mexican narquitectura.

But nothing encapsulates the taste for flare and the constant nearness to death that are distinguishing features of the local drug-trade culture like the town's funerary architecture:

This is the tomb of the famous slain banda singer, Valentín "El Gallo" Elizalde

torre reforma

2009-06-26T16:16:00.005+02:00

Why do we despise certain buildings? Because they are poorly designed? Obnoxiously scaled? Due to their violent disregard for their surroundings? Maybe just because they've displaced older, possibly more valuable or endearing buildings for the sake of progress (oh the tired and lame excuse)? What about all of the above?

Not content with shutting down the most spectacular, most massive and glitziest gay club in Mexico City (five years ago my bf and I kissed for the very first time in the earlier location of the very same club in the Colonia Roma) the realtors and developers behind the Torre Reforma have stripped the city of another little piece of history and spirit.

And all for what? Well, to build the tallest building (oh the even more tired and lame excuse) in (drumroll)... Latin America! Woo-f*ckin'-hoo.

Ta-da! The Torre Reforma, to be completed in 2011

If you think the hulky horror is ugly on top, wait till you see the bottom!

Cataloged building under the Torre Reforma. The XIXth-century casona was the former home of the Living Reforma gay club.

This is historic preservation, Mexico City style.

Oh, and for all of those architects out there cheering this feat of humbug modernity, just so you know, they didn't only tear down the parking lot nextdoor to build the thing. They also threw in a little 1940's Luis Barragán apartment building, just for the fun of it.

Luis Barragán, Rio Elba 56 apartment building, now demolished. Photo by thom's'

luz del mundo

2009-06-21T10:44:00.013+02:00

International Sanctuary of the Light of the World Church, Guadalajara, Mexico

Don't worry. You haven't typed "blogpsot" instead of "blogspot".

Alternative religiousness can be a scary. Think Waco or Heaven's Gate. Even when cult suicide isn't involved, modern sects can still be seriously unsettling. And fun to watch.

Temple in Honduras

As I've said before, the early nineties were crazy times for Mexico, with economic and political upheavals having a serious resonance in popular religiousness, with its range of urban and architectural imprints.

Temple in Córdoba, Veracruz, Mexico

We have our own corporate mega-sect to thank for giving us one of the country's wackiest home-grown architectural styles, ever. The Iglesia de Dios, Columna y Apoyo de la Verdad, Jesús La Luz del Mundo (Church of God, Column and Pillar of Truth, Jesus the Light of the World, or just Light of the World, for short) could be a Mexican equivalent of Scientology.

Temple in León, Guanajuato, Mexico

Founded in 1926 by a self-proclaimed apostle of Christ from Monterrey, Aarón Joaquín González, the cult has reportedly grown to have over 1.5 million followers in Mexico and another 3 or 4 million in the rest of Latin America and other countries.

Another shot of the International Sanctuary

Their main temple, the International Sanctuary in the Hermosa Provincia (Fair Province) neighborhood of Guadalajara (Mexico's second-largest city) seats 12,000 people, occupies 15,500 sqm, and has an 88m-high tower — and it's one of the more sober examples.

The sect is extremely controversial. Not only is it constantly being attacked by the zealous Mexican Catholic Church, but other grave accusations have also been made against it for all sorts of reasons: fraud, shady political activities and even narco-money laundering. Judging by the organization's taste in architecture, it makes perfect sense.

Photos found at the Luz del Mundo Skycrapercity thread. For more, visit the mañanarama tumblr

arquitectura de la revolución (1)

2009-06-17T09:04:00.007+02:00

Francisco Borbolla and Luis Lelo de Larrea, Monumento a la Raza, Mexico City, 1940

Mexicanista scholars love to talk and write about the Arquitectura de la Revolución, the nationalist-cum-statist architectural production spawned by the Mexican Revolution (1910-1921), which supposedly thrived at least until the late sixties.

But what exactly is this “Architecture of the Revolution” anyway? Generally speaking, I would say this notion applies to:

1– A set of both abstract incursions (identitarian pursuits, speculative representations of the National, a reconciliation between localism and universalism, tradition and modernity, etc.) and concrete efforts (the incorporation of technical innovation, new architectural typologies, formal and stylistic clashes, etc.) that
defined the limits of architectural practice in Mexico during this period.

2– The consolidation of a “revolutionary” architectural agenda and of a State monopoly over the true, legitimate Architecture of the Revolution.

le corbusier in mexico

2009-06-06T10:32:00.014+02:00

A couple of months ago I had a little spell of déjà vu at my local Barcelona bookstore. I was looking through the architecture novelties section, bored and disillusioned, till I spotted the following disturbing cover:

The kitschy artwork and the melodramatic title seemed terribly familiar. In the spirit of the classical Mexican monografía — a moralistic, sentimental graphic cultural artifact that I will further analyze in a future post — this biographical Corbu comic written by Fernando Gay and illustrated by María I. Camberos was originally printed in Mexico City, by Editorial Novaro, in 1966.

An obscure — possibly ersatz — publishing house, Editorial Massilia (the name of the ship on board of which Le Corbusier crossed the Atlantic in his first trip to the Americas, in 1929), has a facsimile edition circulating all over Spain, apparently.

advanced mexican modern technology

2009-06-06T10:04:00.011+02:00

The latest in Advanced Modern Technology as envisioned by Mexican B-Movies in the 1980s.

El Secuestro de Lola (Lola la Trailera 2), 1985

modern mexico

2009-06-05T16:00:00.009+02:00

Image results for "Mexico" and "Modern" in Life magazine

The town of New Guerrero being constructed, showing the modern, ranch style houses, 1953

Double decker bus on modern highway from Cuernavaca to Mexico City, 1958

A modern Mayan youth, 1947

Modern food market named `Mercado de La Merced', 1958

Modern store in Mexico City, 1958

Excellent picture of the "New Look" of the city showing modern office buildings, 1958

Modern sculpture at the Mexican Art Exhibit, Paris, 1952

Seen from top of modern building whose roof is playground for children, 1958

Polynesian restaurant "Mauna Loa" featuring pink flamingoes in sunken pit, 1958

Central Airport building where musicians entertain travelers, 1958

uruapan

2009-05-26T08:19:00.009+02:00

This is Uruapan, a smallish town in the State of Michoacán. Same place where heads rolled (literally, on the dance floor of a dirty nightclub) in the little skit that just might mark the dawn of Narco-Statehood in Mexico.

For more of this ganster's paradise, see the Skyscrapercity thread "Uruapan. Paraíso Michoacano".

cracks

2009-05-26T07:59:00.005+02:00

Mexican cracks. Jennifer Mannebach and David Wildfield at Public Collectors.

See also: Documentation of Face Painting Options in Mexico City.

zona rosa

2009-05-21T09:23:00.014+02:00

Some of you out there have been complaining that my posts are too long and nostalgic, so today I’m keeping it short and contempo.

According to the Real Academia, the word antro (derived from the Latin antrum and the Greek antron; a cavity or chamber) refers to:

1. A cavern, cave or grotto.
2. A place, establishment, residence, etc. of poor aspect or reputation.

The English equivalent of antro would be a dive or shithole. Mexico City has an entire neighborhood that is one big antro: the Zona Rosa.

Once it was posh and cosmopolitan, now it is gaudy and queer.

It’s a fallen neighborhood. Only the dated tourist guides still consider the area one of the city’s “main attractions.” Unless you’re into sex tourism, that is. The Zona Rosa's streets are full of huge, old German or Dutch men holding hands with skinny underage brown boys with their pants hanging down to their groins.

You might spot a scared, lost, straight gringo couple that had been here once in the seventies and wanted to relive the good ‘ol days. You feel bad for them.

The Pink Zone was originally called that because it was a soft and prissy version of a red light district. Nowadays it's gotten so seedy that people are actually calling it Zona Roja or Zonaja for short. (Sonaja means rattle in Spanish.) The Zona Rosa is Mexico City’s take on the zonas (tolerance zones, or “Boystowns”) that made Mexican bordertowns infamous in the 1920s. But gayer.

Today, the Zona Rosa is more pink as in splattered brains or insides.

Many of Mexico City's central neighborhoods have made a comeback and turned posh again after the 1985 post-earthquake exodus, but not the Zona Rosa.

The area is packed with shady teibols (table-dance clubs), merengue dance halls, gay clubs with Styrofoam cave-like interiors, Korean fast food joints, Korean hair salons, Korean Karaoke bars with Carpenters songs. There’s also a bunch of clubs without names or street numbers; backrooms for swingers parties, orgies, dress-code parties, show-and-tell parties, or whatever type of party you can think of.

The bars that do have a name are called Keops, Pussy, Boybar, Atenea, Lipstick, Crazy, Pink, Bgay, Shiva, Boots, Neon, Safari, and VIP.

It’s the only place in town where you can get contraband unfiltered Lucky Strikes.

The urban scale and the architecture of this gangrenous limb of the Colonia Juárez are fantastic. As one of the first modern, upper-class planned subdivisions of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the Zona Rosa boasts a surreal array of architectural styles: Neoclassical, Neo-Colonial, French Colonial, Mission (known as Estilo California in Mexico), Art Déco, Mexican Streamline, etc. In the later decades, International Style, Barraganesco, Bureaucratic Baroque (or Estilo Priísta Tardío), and Corporate Kitsch have been layered on top.

Until recently, the Zona Rosa was the only part of the city with exclusively pedestrian streets. But they were used more for cruising than walking.

Needless to say, I'm a fan.

tgp

2009-05-19T07:03:00.020+02:00

Alfredo Salce, "The USSR defends the liberties of the world. Let us help her!" (1941)

I was vaguely familiar with the work of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphics Workshop, or TGP) but I never knew it had been directed by Hannes Meyer or that it was still standing today.

The TGP as it stands today, in the infamous yet picturesque Colonia Doctores

The TGP was established in 1937, during the golden age of Cardenismo, of course, on a street that was famous for its prostitutes. Most of the workshop's original members also belonged to the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios, the Revolutionary Writers and Artists League, or LEAR.

Leopoldo Méndez, "Nazism. 5th Conference. Nazi propaganda and espionage. Keynote speaker: J. Loredo Aparicio" The conferences was sponsored by the Pro-German Culture League of Mexico, an anti-fascist group of Teutonic expats.

Leopoldo Méndez, "Bring to the conscience of the popular masses, the conviction that the necessary elimination of Imperialist wars depends on the solidarity of workers. The Pacifist Congress" (1937)

The TGP printed everything from theater posters to populist didactic flyers and embellished political pamphlets.

Luis Arenal, "Enroll in the Communist Party. For the unity of the People. For the complete triumph of the Revolution. For a free, joyous Mexico" (1938)

Like most of the cultural production of the postrevolutionary ferment, by the late 1940s the TGP fell prey to the institutionalization of the Revolution, little more than an outlet for officialist propaganda of the "Pacific Revolution".

Alberto Beltrán,"May 1st. Labor Day. The CTM (the Confederation of Mexican Workers) united with all Mexicans for the greatness of the Nation" (1947)

Alberto Beltrán, "The corrido of the Peace Congress" (1949)

o'gormania

2009-05-17T20:10:00.023+02:00

Juan O'Gorman in the house-studio he built for Diego Rivera

Despite being considered a more pure, efficient and rational approach to building, especially when compared with the remnants of nineteenth-century theatricality and pastiche that were still en vogue at the time, functionalism in Mexico in the early 1930s was hardly neutral or detached. In fact, it was a thoroughly politicized movement, overcharged with symbolism: the anti-style style.

Funcionalismo promised a cool, effective balm that would counter the aesthetic and ideological malaise of the disruption produced by the Mexican Revolution; a steady hand that could shake Mexican modernism out of its adolescent identity crisis. It was basically a focusing of ideals: architecture should be cheap, solid and clean.

In his early years, Juan O’ Gorman was the champion of this tidying-up tendency. Born in 1905 to a Mexican mother and an Irish father, in his twenties he decided he wanted to be a painter and architect, after a brief stint as a Med student. He grew up to be one of the great modern architectural figures in Mexico, with all the traits of a proper revolucionario: grandiloquent, vociferous, slightly dogmatic and profoundly contradictory.

Juan O'Gorman, Self-portrait (1950)

O’Gorman hit the drawing board precisely at the time when President Cárdenas had invited Hannes Meyer —the lesser-known director of the Bauhaus and ardent Marxist who left Weimar to create an architectural “Left Column” in the USSR — to settle in Mexico and lead the way for the proletarian phase of the Constructive Revolution. With Cárdenas’s blessing, the recently founded Instituto Politécnico (or El Poli, as it's known in common-folk parlance) took him in as the director of the Architecture and Urbanism program, with the intention of creating a suitable rival to the conservative Escuela Nacional (the former San Carlos academy), still seeped in a stale beaux-arts tradition. (See pop note below.)

Hannes Meyer

Meyer returned to Europe in 1949, but he left a permanent mark on Modern Mexican architecture. His groupies — technical rationalists and funcionalistas — had assimilated the notion of architecture as a technology-driven discipline (not Art). Their concerns superseded those of moderate modernistas. Not only were they trying to give Mexico a Modern Face, an image; they also saw themselves paving the way for a rational, socialist future. Following Meyer’s cues, they were convinced that architecture’s function was to cover basic needs and promote a leveling of society.

José Chávez Morado. Fascism in Latin America. From the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) volume, Estampa Mexicana, edited by Hannes Meyer (1949)

The suizo’s ideas had a major influence on O’Gorman and many of his contemporaries. Meyer’s neue baulehre, along with his discovery of Le Corbusier, lured O’Gorman into the barrage of the early Modern Movement. (The fact that, in his own words, O’Gorman only did a “selective reading” of Corb doesn’t mean he only superficially or partially dipped into the work, but more that he handpicked key concepts and tried to adjust them to the Mexico’s very particular material, labor, economic and social conditions.)

Juan O’ Gorman started making a name for himself as a fierce critic of the symbolist architecture that the first postrevolutionary regime had adopted under the cultural command of José Vasconcelos — who’s lavish, practically mystical hispanismo deformed into an unfortunate cuddling-up to fascism in his later years. For O’Gorman, the neocolonial agenda that dominated the official quest for a modern, national cultural production was pure architectural fanatism. Yet his own understanding of the power and lure of architecture was very close to that of the cultural caudillo.They both understood architecture as a tool for politics, and they both trusted its didactic and socially transformative capacities.

Carlos Obregon Santacilia, Mexican Pavilion at the 1922 Rio de Janeiro Exhibition

In terms of style though, O’Gorman very vocally distanced himself from Vasconcelos. He dismissed the stylistic obsession of the prior decades, adopting a supposedly neutral, objective, “scientific” approach to construction.

Juan O'Gorman, Sketch of the M. Toussaint house

But by the mid-1960s, O’Gorman thought differently:

Man needs more than functionalism, a building has to be something more than simply useful … Man’s requirements go beyond this: aspect, environment, beautiful proportion, appearance, a space of pleasurable sensations, forms and colors that give satisfaction and pleasure. All this is beyond the scope of any strict functionalist. But subjective needs, in many cases, are more important than the objective ones … Functionalism should be the base … It is wrong to believe that functionalism is in itself an end. (source)

But that was after he had taken refuge in his neo-primitive house/grotto (volcanic rock, colored mosaic, giant butterflies, jaguars, Aztec Eagle Warriors), after ditching the role of functionalist prophet for an even more colorful part: shaman of organicist Mexotica.

Juan O'Gorman looking out his bedroom window (1959) Source: LIFE

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pop note

The Escuela Nacional was later incorporated into the UNAM. Rivalry with El Poli transcended mere architectural predilection. In fact, competition was so fierce and so deeply imbedded in popular perception, that in the early fifties the one-and-only Dámaso Pérez Prado, exiled Cuban and ballroom king, dedicated a special mambo to each one of them. I don't know if the tunes were commissioned, but considering this was a time when government-owned cabarets where common and the entire country was being steadily seduced by mass media, I wouldn't be surprised.

eightfold

2009-05-13T09:24:00.005+02:00

.
.
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Burian's Four O'Gorman Dichotomies:

1. Cosmopolitanism vs Nativism
2. Mechanicism vs Organicism
3. Abstraction vs Figuration
4. Technology vs Representation

Or, the Mexican Modernist Dharma Wheel

*Wiring detail in O'Gorman's Casa Estudio Diego Rivera. Photo by Tal Schori.

MMDID

2009-05-12T08:42:00.006+02:00

The O'Gormans play chess at home. From LIFE.
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MMDID: Mexican Modernist Dissociative Identity Disorder

stop suffering (from modernization)

2009-05-08T15:56:00.030+02:00

As Mexico went from Third to First World and back throughout the 1990s, signs of the puffed-up success and subsequent failure of the latest wave of modernization sweeping the country (and the capital in particular) dotted the built landscape.

Early in that manic-depressive decade, the promises of neoliberalism were materialized in blue-hued mirrored glass and pink limestone. After remaining empty for years, The Hotel de México — a desarrollismo era icon-to-be turned massive structural carcass — was scheduled to reopen as a new WTC, complete with a Hilton and a J.C. Penny’s. Mini-skyscrapers and chain restaurants sprung up on lots left empty in the aftermath of the '85 earthquake, inner-city factories turned into Costcos, and the decadent movie theaters of my childhood, with their sticky floors and rat infestations and mid-movie intermissions, became proper multi-screen cineplexes with soda machine refills and self-service candy buffets stuffed with the once-exotic treats imported from the States (Nerds, Bubblegum Tape, Jelly Belly jelly beans... Stuff that in the old days you could only buy from black market peddlers squatting outside elementary schools). We were becoming modern, global, North American, gringos, and it was glorious.

Soon enough, the new life modernization injected turned Frankenstein on us.

In 1994, just as the signing of Nafta was supposed to crown the Mexican Neo-miracle, the irruption of the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army, in case you didn’t know), growing political violence (including the slaying of the 70-year-rule official party’s presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio) and the peso crash of December all contributed to the country’s downgrade from neoliberal poster child to paradigm of distorted development.

As a consequence of the financial breakdown, prices soared, jobs were lost, construction halted and violence erupted like we had never seen: fingers, ears and other body fragments arrived by mail to families as proof that a loved one’s kidnappers weren’t kidding, drivers were randomly gunned down on traffic-jammed highways in broad daylight, taxis became deathtraps, glue-sniffing kids would knife you for a Casio. Everyone had an intimate quotidian violence tale to tell.

In the dreadful vertigo of those years, a wave of superstition and bogus spirituality arose in the city, eventually morphing into a millenarian, pseudo-religious revival (with its corresponding architecture).

Major TV networks were covering a series of bizarre attacks on livestock in different parts of the country and attributed them to the chupacabras, a demonic creature with tiger fangs and wolf fur and a rat’s face (and in a couple of eyewitness accounts, bat wings), making the most ridiculous of folktale monsters seem biologically plausible in comparison.

Top government intelligence agencies hired Francisca Zetina aka "La Paca", a fortune-teller and cult leader, to solve a string of political murders. The charade included a televised manhunt led by her visions. La Paca was arrested when it was discovered she had actually stolen and then planted the human remains that had supposedly "contacted" her and that the whole investigation was tainted.

Popular taste for the occult, nevertheless, kept being exploited. Morning shows had their own spook sections with ghostbuster expert panels and live reports from cemeteries and haunted houses. Saints that where believed to offer protection from being snatched or having your S.U.V stolen became especially popular among the well-to-do crowd. Soon enough, captors and carjackers found their own spiritual patrons.

The fact that social instability encourages deviant spiritualities and mystical upsurges that feed off turmoil is well-established. In Mexico City, during la crisis of the 1990s, these virulent impulses — triggered by fear, moral and material disruptions, and a sectarian mood set off by the crumbling political regime and the dissolution of corporate and traditionalist social bonds — started seeping into everyday life.

Our dubious spiritual reawakening became more visible in a series of small and ephemeral urban events. One of most noted occurrences was the miraculous apparition of the Virgen del Metro, the Subway Virgin. The Hidalgo metro station became an instant pilgrimage destination in 1997 after a water leak drew a familiar shape on the floor in one of its corridors. The stain was taken for the Virgin of Gualupe. People flocked around the stain and lit candles and kissed the floor, undisturbed by rush hour crowds squeezing into and out of trains. The floor tile had to be removed and encased in a glass altar. This led to a chain of replications across the city. There were reports of la Virgen showing up on tree-trunks and tortillas. I remember that in the same week, only a few blocks away from my parents’ house, a two-day roadblock was installed because La Virgen had appeared in the middle a narrow street, its dark silhouette etched onto the asphalt. Camera crews kept rolling in until a couple of teenagers that lived on the same block confessed to having drawn the Virgin themselves with motor oil.

Eventually, the shams gave way to more systematic and permanent imprints on the urban fabric.

One day, out of the blue, a handful of the city’s grand movie theaters of yore traded their crumbling marquees for billboards boasting a Valentine’s day blood-red heart with a white dove hovering over it, and a killer motto stamped in bold, blue lettering: Pare de sufrir, "stop suffering".

The billboards cried out to the battered and bruised inhabitants of the capital. At first no one knew what the hell they were. A stupid add campaign for low fat mayonnaise or sunglasses? A new telenovela or political party? The first Pare de sufrir sign I saw was draped over the entrance of the Teatro Silvia Pinal (see pop note below) an old government-owned theater I held dear ever since I saw my first-ever Broadway-style musical there: an adaptation of Cats. I first thought "Stop Suffering" might be a sequel to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I wasn’t that far-off.

It turned out that the theaters were bought and readapted by a South American
corporate sect that was still pretty obscure back then: the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG). The UCKG doesn’t only select theaters and large entertainment venues for their seating capacity: they are the perfect architectural choice — physically and symbolically — for mounting Christian consumerist extravaganzas with inspirational music powerful like a Menudo ballad, dead of night infomercials, golden Styrofoam thresholds, salvation cash deposits, Monday Godly Entrepreneurial Meetings and Saturday Hopeless Case and Love Therapies, and sales on selected items (holy water from the River Jordan, holy cloth from Jerusalem, middle-eastern Sharon roses, stones from the grave of Jesus Christ, miraculous oils from the olive trees of Gethsemane, etc).

Historically, the relationship between religion and modernity has been complicated and contradictory. At times religious beliefs have been fuel for change, at times the target of its assaults. Mexican Modernism (Modern Mexico in general) played this pull and push game repeatedly: it’s had a little bit of everything, from the Jacobin church demolitions of the Reforma wars to the soul-searching structural calculations of Felix Candela’s 1950s suburban chapels.

The curious thing about the more recent run-ins between modernizing and ritual tendencies in Mexico is that, at least as far as spatial phenomena go, these tendencies seem to be going in a direction opposite to what theory would dictate. The painful processes of becoming Modern — particularly painful when they go awry — have spurred a confusion of roles, strategies and spatial patterns. ¿Where are the Modern and the Traditional in a decrepit secular temple (movie theater) readapted as Church that has embraced the coarsest, most predatory features of consumer culture? Or when deaf-ear superstition actively colonizes the purest and most rational products of Modernity (mass transit)? More than a result of the eternal fight between Progress and the Primitive, these anomalous religious urban outbursts are symptoms of modernization looking for a way out of its own snares.

*photo by Flickr user manu

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pop note

The theater was named after Silvia Pinal: Buñuel muse. Former wife and onstage partner of Enrique Guzmán (1960s teddybear hunk singer). Grandmother of naughty minor rockstar Stephanie Salas (who bore the firstborn child of the ultimate pop idol of the late twentieth century in Mexico; a blong Pedro Infante of sorts: Luis Miguel) and mother of naughty major popstar Alejandra Guzmán (the “Mexican Madonna"). Host and matriarch of the hit daytime television show, Mujer, casos de la vida real. The show ~~has been running since~~ ran from the mid-eighties to 2007, ~~and~~ but Pinal’s charm and face are as tight as ever. Mujer is an arresting staged-reality show with actors replaying the confidences sent via standard courier (~~maybe it’s e-mail now, not sure. I haven’t been able to watch in ages~~ and apparently e-mail towards the end) by female (or, occasionally, transgender) viewers. Delivering one hour of none-stop tear-jerking bliss, the show deserves a post of its own. Maybe.

valle de los caídos

2009-04-30T07:21:00.017+02:00

Don't you just love architectural timeliness, tact and critical awareness? Michel Rojkind, our (adult) contemporary bad-ass archi-genius/fallen pop-star drummer has announced a project — developed with Bjarke "big.dk" Ingels — for a new Museo Tamayo extension on the outskirts of Mexico City. Go against the flow, man, totally. Luckily for the gnarly dude, given the situation, the project might actually spark some interest. Not as another iconic whopper for the art world, but maybe as a Mexican Valle de los Caídos (de la Gripe Porcina). Powerful stuff.

solitary architectural pleasures

2009-04-28T19:00:00.029+02:00

Some people are into feet. Others go for the frostier, decidedly unmeaty appeal of leather or latex. Moving it up a notch, certain individuals get off on brick and mortar (or steel, or glass, or concrete).

Is it really that strange that someone should fall in love with the Berlin Wall or want to
marry the Eiffel Tower? In this cold, cold world of ours, I have to confess that even I have sought solace in structures.

In my tender years, as prone to pseudo-poetic highs and tragicomedy as I was, and living in Mexico City, of all places — an untapped paradise for this sort of thing — I had my share of adolescent crushes on buildings.

I felt like rubbing up against the floating staircase in the Barragán House.

I fancied a ménage-a-trois with O'Gorman's pink-for-Diego and blue-for-Frida
house-studio (I was particularly drawn to the wonderfully phallic cactus fence).

Back then, few things in life made me happier than getting lost in the maze of downtrodden déco and futurist behemoths of the underrated streets of the Centro Histórico: López, Ayuntamiento, Dolores, Luis Moya...

All these fixations were fleeting and childish, though, compared to what a slightly tilted building on the corner of Jalisco and Revolución stirred in me. Juan Segura's Edificio Ermita has been the subject of many-a-fantasy and constant
reverie since I first laid eyes on it. Looming over Tacubaya, it's our own cut-back, depressed take on the billboard-skyscraper, "the Mexican Times Square," some say with a smirk.

O.K., so the Ermita is a wannabe. But this is exactly what makes it a symbol of Mexico City: its aspirational obsessiveness, a self-conscious dread of — and everyday struggle against — underdevelopment. Segura (1898-1989) conceived the building as a beacon of possibility, but today, swamped by 24hr chino cafés, "American-style" eateries with melamine tableware, dingy little dope-spot pocket-parks, black light basement dance clubs and markets where you can get a haircut and a cow-tongue taco from the same stand, it only stands as a stoic testament to things that never were.

The building is kind of schmaltzy, but overall breathtaking. Completed in 1931, it was one of the first skyscrapers in the city. Pictures of the Ermita from around the time it was built show the sleepy farmlands of the area, still largely undeveloped except for a few fin de siècle mansions and even fewer proto-industrial workshops. There's one with burros riding down Avenida Revolución (then Calvario Street). Even today the building feels out of scale. In a strange inversion of what would happen in a genuinely modernist city, instead of sparking a manic let's-see-who-has-the-biggest (uh, I mean tallest) -building construction blitz, the Ermita's presence seems to have inhibited vertical growth. Everything around it stayed flat. This flatness adds visual drama, it creates the effect of a sole survivor left standing after nuclear fallout or something, choking in the stewy afternoon smog. The Ermita is Mexico's own Genbaku Dome, a memorial to our first-round fall in a long fight for Modernidad.

Throughout the day, the grayish-pink Mexico City sunlight pierces through the building's central dome, filling the private interior court shared by neighbors and dressed scantly with tropical greenery. The building has a near-triangular base that fits snuggly on its 1,390 sqm corner site, with an original program that was quite unorthodox for Mexico at the time: shops on two of the outer facades, a large movie theater occupying most of the ground level, and various apartment types on the upper floors. Today, many of the apartments are empty (I don't know why; with their hardwood flooring, white walls, antique bathtubs, and double-height ceilings, I find them quite friggin gorgeous), the regal 1,500-seat movie theater was split into smaller screening rooms and is now abandoned, I think; and the shops have been downgraded to discount pharmacies and crappy dollar stores.

A nicer late addition to the building was the Galaxie dance club, which opened ca 2000 or 2001 if my memory doesn't fail me. Dark and kinky, with mirrored walls, zebra print sofas, tubular furniture, obscene lighting fixtures (huge translucent chandeliers shaped like mushrooms and sea-dollars), full of (early) modern-types, and named after one of the very, very few cars that make me drool, the Galaxie was a precursor of the D.F.'s now much-touted party scene, an already forgotten classic, I'd say. It was the kind of place where no one would blame you for believing that the nineties would have a comeback (there was a backroom dance floor in case you couldn't help yourself and had to relive the joys of M.C. Hammer, C&C Music Factory or Technotronic) and which offered rare nightlife wildlife sightings (Zemmoa as a boy, for example). It was one of the first clubs in Mexico with interiors by Emmanuel Picault, though I remember him complaining about the project being cut back and aesthetically unsuccessful overall. Diamond in the rough. I don't know if the Galaxie is still open, but I'm sure that — like everything else in this city — if it is, it's not what it used to be.

Back in the late-twenties and early-thirties, when Segura was working on the project for the Ermita, Mexican architecture was going through its own version of the late Secession-to-Disruption moment. Clashes were entrenched in architecture and aesthetics just as they were in politics. Almost a decade after the Revolution had officially ended, the route it would take as it settled down into Regime was still more or less up for grabs, and for that matter, so was the building agenda and the look it would claim as its own. These were the years of effervescence: of Creole Ulysseses and Cristeros and both Communist and Fascist conjures; but also of quests for True Modern Mexicanness, be it in the form of populist functionalism, neocolonial pastiche, Aztec Streamline and whatnot. (We'll be looking into all those later on.)

For his hardcore left-wing contemporaries (who in fact would later suffer a similar fate and fall from grace during the process of Revolutionary Institutionalization) Segura was more a Menshevik than a true revolucionario; a moderate, incorrigible bourgeois. Part of the dissing was fueled by his attention to ornamental detail: pale corridors with granite floors and fine wooden banisters ribbonned with
Zapotec-ish fretwork; fabulous Art Déco arched doorways and floral-shaped drains scattered on the floor and signed "Diego Rivera". (Rumor has it that the building skylight was originally a Rivera stained-glass dome that "mysteriously" disappeared.) Even today, critics rarely see Segura's work as true Mexican Modern, but rather dismiss it as a set of quaint "transition" architecture specimens. In the end, unlike many of its unabashedly "revolutionary" counterparts, which later degraded to officialist International Style, the architecture of Juan Segura has managed to keep a delightfully modern aura of wonder and surprise.

O.K., so this isn't hardcore proletarian construction. In fact it's a piece of pure middle-class confidence, the supposedly innocent and apolitical faith in slow and steady progress. In truth though, bourgeois aspirations of modernity in Mexico City during those years — particularly in terms of urbanization and of architectural prowess — were just as significant. (This bourgeois/middle-class illusion came down hard like the proletarian one, though not as quickly.) Besides, Mexico City, like any knowledgeable Mexican historian will tell you, has never really been a revolutionary capital. Revolution comes to Mexico City to culminate, to turn into something else, but it seemingly has a hard time sprouting from here.

But enough of these tidbidts; let me get back to the point of my archi-fetish.

The building took its name from an old chapel that originally occupied the site. The word ermita is Spanish for hermitage: a place of retreat, solitary detachment, confinement and reflection. (And whatever else those crazy old desert folk did throughout the centuries, all alone in their caves or their ashrams or the hideaway of their choice.)

The Ermita for me, for some reason, became an instant symbol of everything the future held. I fantasized of moving out of my parent's house and into one of the tiny 30 sqm apartments, ditching school and leaving my messy sex-life behind, taking up a more modest and more contemplative lifestyle, possibly working the night shift at the Café Shanghai to pay the rent. O.K. I didn't actually think I would quit the sex, but I would have more time to myself, in this perfect white-washed pod, in this perfect monster of a building, quietly overlooking the unstable mass of Mexico City.

It was never meant to be, of course, I've grown too old and too attached to leave everything for the Ermita. Just another pipe dream, permanently postponed. The building will probably still haunt me though — evoking all sorts of messy, complicated intensities in my chest — whenever I catch a quick glimpse of it, riding down Revolución.

*photo "Ermita in the rain" by mfandrich

incoming

2009-04-26T11:04:00.016+02:00

News being fed to my screen constantly. Keeping track has never been this easy, or immediate, seriously. Still, I sense a great, big, deep, dark breach that the pixels and the connection speed don't fill. I think of my family, worry. I feel this emptiness even as I devour reports. Is it 20? 60? 81 deaths? I call. My dad seems calm even though two people have died already in the hospital he works at. My mom went to get her hair done on Friday since school was canceled. (She's a teacher. Google says 6 million + kids will be left without school till May 6. MAY 6). I can't believe it. She went out to get bangs or something. "Everyone down here seems pretty calm. We really don't know anything. It's scary, but what can you do?" Feeling of emptiness gets worse. My sister had her evening classes canceled but is still working her regular day shift. No school, no museums, no soccer matches, no concerts, no clubbing, no bars and restaurants, no Sunday mass. In Mexico City. No mass, no restaurants, no soccer; no Sunday. Troops being recalled from Narco War to help deal with public health crisis. "Situation under control." Yeah, right. Mayor goes on news to announce "no further flu-related deaths confirmed in the last..." What? Hour? Two? Even absolute connectedness can't break our good 'ole habit of media distortion, political manipulation and control. The mayor is announcing the news like it was one of the local government's achievements: X new streets paved! X school lunches delivered! No pig flu deaths today! (Church bells ringing here in Barcelona, we woke up to a surprise thunder storm this morning after killer sunshine over the weekend.) I think of my friends, of everyone I know. I check my emails and my RSS. Tons of posts on the subject of Mexico epidemic are already popping up. How do they do it? I can hardly think of what to say. Even super-smart, sensitive, engaged, posting-addicted bloggers that are THERE, LIVING IT are having a hard time coming to terms with the situation. (I'm thinking of you too.) Some of these tangentially-related posts just make me want to slap my f*cking laptop screen, make me feel like this whole global digital proximity is a big f*cking lie. Turning what is happening into instant easy-bake blogging. The epidemic as a source of future-dystopian architectural fantasy? Anti-flu furniture at the Fiera? Urban crisis as the ultimate on-line self-publicity stunt generator? Have we lost tact? Is this hunger for being on the crest of everything every single f*cking second making empty-headed infojunkies of us all? I thought TV was bad. Maybe this is worse. Look at me, I'm doing it too. Even as I complain, I'm doing it. (I was listening to M.I.A's "Bird Flu" a few weeks ago on my way to work. I thought it would be a wicked song for the opening hit-and-run sequence in some gritty post-pandemic after-apocalypse Danny Boyle action movie. A chase, of course. For whatever reason. The main man running away from something through narrow, Third-Worldish backstreets or metro station corridors. Wherever: Beijing, Bangkok Toronto, Mumbai, Mexico City.) I think of riding the metro in Mexico City. I think of the faces of people. I feel feverish. British Airways crew member tested for swine flu after visiting Mexico. School kids quarantined (was it quarantined or possibly quarantined? How many was it? 72?) in NY (or did I read New Zealand? I can't remember). 11 cases confirmed in U.S. WHO sets up camp in Mexico to follow the event. Dad has friend working at the CDC, says we can only wait or something like that. Wait. Read. Incoming. Emptiness.

pig flu

2009-04-24T20:00:00.004+02:00

After my somewhat gloomy inaugural post I had a more upbeat and light-hearted one in the oven, but again, my hometown has turned the tables on me. This morning ALL schools in Mexico City (from kintergarden to university) were shut down on account of an apparently new strand of swine flu outbreak that has already taken at least 60 lives. The last time all schools closed here was, precisely, after the earthquake in 1985. Now I'm reading that the WHO is worried that the deaths could mark a pandemic. Are you kidding me? I hate fatalism, but this is scary sh*t.

(failed) state architecture: 1985

2009-04-18T11:19:00.055+02:00

“Don’t be scared folks, let’s just...check the time, will you?... Seven a...Ay, Chihuahua (which is polite for ‘holy sh*t’)...seven-nineteen a.m. and forty-two seconds...” The overhead prop-ceiling of the studio sways like mad and the T.V. breaks to static.

It seemed like an average Thursday morning, September 19, 1985—in the typically damp, sluggish lapse between the frenzied national fiesta of September 15th (Mexican Independence Day) and the solemn, martial commemorations of the 20th (Día de la Revolución)—when an 8.1 Richter-scale earthquake struck Mexico City. The 10,000 official deaths (with an extra 20,000 or 30,000 in most estimates) and the 412 collapsed plus 3,124 damaged buildings were only the most obvious signs of the event’s magnitude.

Ministry of Communications and Transportation Building

The capital suffered an infrastructural debacle. Telephone services were interrupted and the collapse of the central communications building left the D.F. cut off from the rest of the world. For days, 5 million people found themselves without running water and half of the city suffered a total power outage. 137 schools were reduced to rubble and one out of four of existing hospital beds disappeared.

General Hospital

Almost obscenely, the quake exposed the incredible incapacity of both local and federal authorities. Much has been remarked on the subject of the government’s floundering response to the shock (the initial rejection of foreign aid, the blocking of information, the absence of proper shelter or temporary housing alternatives for those affected, etc). The official stalemate was only overridden by the spontaneous actions of an entity until then unheard of in the country: civil society. The whole affair was little more than people doing whatever they could to dig out their relatives or neighbors; maybe fighting for another shot after loosing everything in the disaster. Still, these apparently random and disperse actions were actually filling up cracks in the system. The buildings failed, but somehow the social matter that slowly took form in the year of desarrollismo (despite the regime’s efforts to curb and contain any social or political participation outside of the official party and/or the conditions it defined) proved to be resilient. In a way, it is still trying to shake itself loose.

Amateur rescue and relief brigades

The relationship between the political and material chaos of 1985 is usually taken for a simple cause-and-effect phenomenon. The physical crisis triggered a socio-political one. In fact, the relationship is more complex and significant; and architecture, of course, was at the core of it.

A less noticed but deeper-rooted and farther-reaching systemic failure became apparent in the aftermath of the quake. Many of the affected buildings (and most of the truly spectacular collapses) were public works and commissions. The three-way idyll of architecture, planning and estatismo that had its first trial run in Mexico during the Porfiriato, flourished in the years following the Revolution of 1910-1921 and culminated during the developmentalist era, came down in tandem with some of its pièces de résistance in 1985.

Electric Trolley Change Station

Officialist architecture in Mexico performed a role beyond bare legitimization, symbolism or simple distraction: it was an active force in the definition of the regime’s self-image, and a key factor in its policy implementation schemes. At least throughout our own short twentieth century, architecture—or more precisely, modernist architecture—was profoundly and explicitly (even scandalously) tied to political practice.

Tlatelolco housing block

I’m not getting into this idea too much too soon. (It’s one of the points I want to poke at with this blog, after all.) Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that many of the monster oficialista buildings that either came tumbling down to the ground that morning or had to be demolished shortly thereafter, had a sort of totemic quality to them. They made up the frontispiece of Priísmo but also compacted the confident strides the country had made towards becoming modern for at least fifty years.

Movie theater & Jeans Cafeteria

These buildings were stages for modern life and socialization. Even when the country in so many ways remained backwards and primitive, it was understood, these little pieces of what Mexico could become were highly cherished (and showcased) as sophisticated, metropolitan, cosmopolitan and, more crucially, social architectural successes. With that excuse—the promise of things to come—the regime managed to stay afoot without softening its authoritarian grip. The terremoto proved this pledge to be part of a great big hoax, a cheap facade, a sampling of the traps the system had devised and perfected. Alas, the toll of all those high dreams of government-led modernity was brutal.
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(totems)

— Conjunto Pino Suárez (government office building)

— Multifamiliar Presidente Juárez (public housing development)

— Centro Médico Nacional and Hospital Juárez (major public hospitals)

— Nuevo Leon Building, Tlatelolco (public housing block)

* Images collected from the intense Skyscrapercity Mexico 1985 thread.

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(add some POP) or pop culture aftershocks:

— High: Jose Emilio Pacheco's post-seismic lament, "The Ruins Of Mexico (elegy Of The Return)"

— Lowest of the low: The first feature film that relived the event, Trágico Terremoto en México. It's an Almada brothers D-movie, with the usual moral gore (cut-throat class struggle, illegal abortions, marrow-deep corruption, hairy-chested gun-swaying machos, etc.) Also includes a darkish cabaretera musical number, lousy special effects and male short-shorts even though it was released in 1990. En español, in case you can stomach it.

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space dance

2009-04-05T12:49:00.004+02:00

* Thanks so much to Diego for sending me this little gem.

bienvenido welcome

2009-04-04T11:55:00.010+02:00

Welcome amigos y amigas!

Mañanarama is my brand-new weblog. Here you will find all sorts of visual and textual goodies on the subject of failed development, bogus modernization, and other urban or architectural dreams deferred. I want to ground myself in Mexico, for once, though I'll probably indulge in the occasional musing on (pan)americana, mid-century manias, tercermundismo or just random mexotica.

Enjoy!