magazine no. 23

Magazine No. 23

Mexico City
No. 23 - Mexico City
- page 02
  Cover
  Mexico City
- page 03
  Editorial
  Mexico City
- page 04 - 09
  Mexico City Buzz Blues
  The best of cities, the worst of cities by Mario Ballesteros
- page 10 - 14
  Two Million Homes for Mexico
  Photographs by Livia Corona Benjamin
- page 16 - 20
  No Tabula Rasa
  Interview with Frida Escobedo
- page 21 - 22
  UNAM Campus
  The largest public research university in Latin America
- page 23 - 25
  Zumtobel Group Award
  Part 1
- page 26 - 27
  Memorial to the Victims of Violence
  Gaeta-Springall Arquitectos' design bears witness to the drug wars
- page 28 - 30
  This Neurotic Tradition
  The hardware and the software of the city by Michel Rojkind
- page 31 - 32
  Museo Jumex
  Designed by David Chipperfield Architects with TAAU / Oscar Rodriguez
- page 33 - 42
  Refashioning the Narrative
  Emerging architecture and design practice by Mimi Zeiger
- page 43
  Futureland: Mexico City
  An art project by Nuno Cera
- page 44 - 45
  Museo Soumaya
  Carlos Slim's private collection designed by FR-EE
- page 46 - 47
  Cineteca Nacional
  Michel Rojkind's new space-age cloak
- page 48 - 49
  Lisboa 7
  Modular apartments designed by AT103
- page 50
  Hypars Intersections
  The work of Héctor Zamora
- page 51 - 53
  Blowing in the Wind
  Tatiana Bilbao thinks Mexico City’s problems need better answers
- page 54 - 58
  In the Photo Booth with...
  Luby Springall and Julio Gaeta
- page 59
  Klaustoon
  XVI. Biennale non Banale (AKA: Pharisaic Chants)
- page 60
  Next
  Hans Hollein
- uncube's editors are Sophie Lovell (Art Director, Editor-in-Chief), Florian Heilmeyer, Rob Wilson and Elvia Wilk; editorial assistance: Susie S. Lee and Leigh Theodore Vlassis; graphic design: Lena Giovanazzi; graphics assistance: Madalena Guerra. uncube is based in Berlin and is published by BauNetz, Germany's most-read online magazine covering architecture in a thoughtful way since 1996.
The best way to get under the skin of a place is to get local. Over the past couple of months uncube has made some amazing new friends in the sprawling vibrant colossus that is Mexico City. Writers, photographers, architects and artists, all residents and all mad about their capricious home city share with us – and with you – their own stories about the joys and the problems of building, working, living and loving in “the best of cities and the worst of cities”.

We are spellbound, we hope you will be too when you join us…

down Mexico way.

The editors
Cover Image: “Student at Neighborhood Park”, Cuatro Vientos, Mexico, 2011, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm, from the series “Two Million Homes for Mexico” © Livia Corona Benjamin.
Mexico City Buzz Blues

Text by Mario Ballesteros

Photography Héctor Mediavilla
»Love’s multitudinous boneyard of decay«

Jack Kerouac, “230th Chorus”, Mexico City Blues
In late April 2009, after dozens of deaths from an unidentified virus outbreak, Mexico City was forced to shut itself down. Schools, public buildings and transport, offices, restaurants, and just about any space where people usually gather, were closed off for days. The H1N1 influenza scare managed to do what neither that year’s global economic crisis nor the drug war plaguing other parts of the country had been able to: bring the city to a halt. It wasn’t the first time we’d played out near doomsday scenarios – major earthquakes, ash clouds from neighbouring volcanoes, life-threatening smog contingencies, we’ve had them all, but never had Mexico City seemed so frightening as in those eerily empty days of stillness.

The lure of Mexico City has always been its overflow, its instability, its wild, ancient heart beating relentlessly under layers of mud and bone and concrete and steel, alongside stories of violence, seduction, struggle and joy.

That’s how we like it here.

Shortly after the outbreak, we already had cumbias dedicated to the influenza popping up on YouTube and people were taking back the streets wearing customised protective face masks, and soon enough everyone was hugging and kissing cheeks again and effusively shaking previously-disinfected hands. In a matter of days, Mexico City was back on its feet, and life was as loud and busy and bustling as usual.
All photos © Héctor Mediavilla, from the series “Megalopolis Underground”, which documents Mexico City's underground metro system.
»...its wild, ancient heart beating relentlessly under layers of mud and bone and concrete and steel...«
That pretty much sums up the essence of this beast of a city: a happy, raucous, day-to-day normal skimming on the surface of tragedy. And it’s probably why you won’t see us on any “most livable city” list. We’re not the prettiest, and we’re definitely not the easiest, nor the most civilised. We’re not for everyone. Mexico City is tough, but once you give yourself over to her, once she eats you up like a postmodern sacrificial virgin, her insides are warm and deep and alive more than any city you know. There’s this Mexico City high.
»...a happy, raucous, day-to-day normal skimming on the surface of tragedy.«
Part of it might be the fact we’re standing on an ancient lake bed, sinking and shaking nonstop. Part of it might be the fumes from the three million cars that clog the city’s arteries, or the permanent sensory overload, the noise and visual frenzy of an oversaturated cityscape.

But part of it is pure juice, thick and intoxicating goo covering your skin the moment you step out onto the street, swaying you constantly between the most vital buzz and the most melancholy blues.
- Mario Ballasteros is an independent editor and critic. After six years in Barcelona, he returned to Mexico City in 2012 to launch and direct the Mexican edition of Domus magazine. He currently works for the Laboratorio para la Ciudad, an experimental think tank inside the Mexico City government.
  
  mananarama.tumblr.com
  
  @marioballe
- Héctor Mediavilla is a Spanish documentary photographer working primarily in Africa and Latin America since 2001. His work focuses on social injustices and understanding the human condition. His images have been published in international publications and exhibited at the Musée Dapper in Paris, the Museum der Weltkulturen in Frankfurt, Galleria Ollerios, Sao Paulo and the Centre Culturel Français of Kinshasa.
  
  In his series, Megalopolis Underground, Héctor Mediavilla documents the underground metro systems of Mexico City and Sao Paulo, the largest cities in Latin America. Transporting more than 4 million passengers per day, Mediavilla portrays the erosion of personal space and identity when travelling as an amorphous mass of people, especially during rush hours.
  
  hectormediavilla.com
The blues covers the closed parts of the city, divided by fences and overpasses and electric gates, and guarded residential towers. It lingers in the forgotten structures of the past, as time chips away at them bit by bit. It oozes from the manicured lawns of the architectures of status and power and the rough makeshift edges of the architectures of survival. It rubs off on both rich and poor on their weary rides home stuck in traffic in rundown peseros or imported sedans with fresh wax jobs. It emanates from deep desecrations and dead idols and the bad karma piling up in the city for centuries: conquest, invasions, power struggles, student massacres, gratuitous violence.

The buzz spurts from the open city: the squares and plazas and parks, the pilgrimages and political concentrations and festive massive congregations. It hangs from the improvised stalls that bleed out onto the streets with their pink and red tarps that can be spotted from an airplane in the sea of grey. You taste it in our rich, dizzying food and in our far out musical mashups and our daytime melodramas. It feeds a unique breed of architecture, dressed with the theatrics of identity and wannabe modernity, struggling between heavy institutional mass and fearless experimentation and independent spirit.

This bluesy buzzy goo is what makes Mexico City lush. It’s not an easy breezy leafy lush, but a twisted, multitudinous, superimposed lushness of meat and stone and plastic and organic matter. The lushness of life and death and growth from decay. Mexico City doesn’t stand for the civilised triumph over nature, but as testament to our flawed and tremendously human understanding and celebration and fear of it.

The best of cities and the worst of cities.

And we are mad about her. I

ABOUT mario ballesteros

ABOUT hÉctor mediavilla
Two Million Homes
for Mexico

Text & Photography Livia Corona Benjamin
“Your First Home”, Ensenada, Mexico, 2009, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.
“French Restaurant”, Ixtapaluca, Mexico, 2009, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.

“Single to Two-Story Expansion”, Santa Barbara, Mexico, 2009, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.
In 2000, Mexican presidential candidate Vicente Fox Quezada proposed an unprecedented plan to build two million low-income homes throughout the country during his six year term. On the eve of his election, Fox proclaimed: “My presidency will be remembered as the era of public housing”. To enable this initiative, the federal government ceded the construction of low-income housing to a small group of private investors. Almost overnight, grids containing 20-80,000 identical homes at a time sprang up in remote agrarian territories all over the country.

These are not neighborhoods of a “Home Sweet Home” dream fulfilled, but ubiquitous grids of ecological and social interventions on a scale and of consequences that are difficult to grasp. In these places, urbanisation is reduced to the mere construction of housing. There are nearly no public amenities and only very few commercial structures. Yet the demand for these low-income homes continues to increase and developers continue to provide them with extreme efficiency.
“Yard to Home Conversion”, El Sauzai, Mexico, 2011, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.
“Progressive Development”, Los Heroes, Puebla, Mexico, 2009, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.
- Livia Corona Benjamin was born in Baja California, Mexico. She currently lives in New York and Mexico City and was recently awarded with a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her photography book project, “Two Million Homes for Mexico”. Unlike regular architectural photography, Corona's images do not claim to document architecture. Corona says she constructs “pictures informed by concrete or intangible aspects of buildings”, developing scenarios that transform thematic and formal aspects of the respective architectonic concept. The photographs tell of the life of the project, peculiarities of its protagonists, characteristics of the site, and atmosphere of its spaces.
  
  liviacorona.com
Fox’s presidency lasted six years, during which some 2,350,000 homes were built, which equals a rate of 2,500 homes per day – and this trend is continuing.

Over the past four years, I have been exploring these developments in my project called Two Million Homes for Mexico. Through images, films, and interviews, I look at the spaces between promises and their fulfillment. In my photographs of multiple developments near Mexico City and in Baja California, I consider the rapid redefinition of Mexican “small town” life and the sudden transformation of the Mexican ecological and social landscape.

These urban developments mark a profound evolution in our way of inhabiting the world. In my work I seek to give form to their effect upon the experience of the individual… what exactly happens in these two million homes? How are tens of thousands of lives played out against a confined, singular cultural backdrop? I

about livia corona Benjamin
“Living Room to Bedroom Conversion”, Merida, Mexico, 2011, C-Print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm © Livia Corona Benjamin.
Photo © Rolex / Hideki Shiozawa
No Tabula Rasa

Interview with Frida Escobedo

by Florian Heilmeyer
It seems that there is no shortage of exciting young architects in Mexico City at the moment. As soon as we start to call the likes of Derek Dellekamp, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind and Fernando Romero the “new generation”, there are already younger ones making their appearance on the scene. One of them is Frida Escobedo, who founded her own office in Mexico City in 2006 focusing mostly on smaller commissions commuting from the arts to architecture and back again. In our interview, she explains why her preference for small commissions and simple answers is her reaction to the context of Mexico City.
Escobedo moved two murals by Siqueiros that were originally situated in the courtyard to the outside of the building, clearly marking the entrance of the museum and a new connection to the public square in front of it. (Photos: Rafael Gamo)
What is your impression of Mexico City right now?

I think the city is living through a very interesting moment, where a new generation of architects, artists and designers seems to be finding fertile ground for playing around. It might not be with huge commissions – it’s more about tiny collaborations or smaller projects – but finding pleasure and fulfilment in these small tasks is liberating in a way. As a result I believe that we are more flexible, and more resilient than the generations before us.

I mean, you’ve probably heard this a thousand times before, but there is so much energy and information in Mexico City. We are nearly 20 million in the metropolitan area, so everyday living implies massive challenges. We have to deal with housing, mobility, economics, or politics in a very dynamic way. Everything becomes an opportunity. There is a lot to work with, and most of it is urgent.
Escobedos' conversion of La Tallera in Cuernavaca (1965), is her biggest and most famous project to date. The former home and studio of late Mexican muralist and political activist David Alfaro Siqueiros has now been transformed into a museum, workshop and artist’s residency programme. (Photo: Rafael Gamo)
Would you describe yourself as a Mexican architect then?

I do think that we react to our context. I happen to live in a city that I find fascinating in all its complexity. I like to believe that I’ve learned from this context and that the simplest response happens to be the best response within these complexities.

There are so many young architects in Mexico City at the moment, yet it seems that their work is really versatile and varied. Do you see any links to the output of “older” young architects like Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Fernando Romero and such?

I think there is no “Mexican scene”.

Architecture is produced by a very diverse group of people, who range from the well established to the very young. We all have different voices and the principles behind what we produce are not defined by the generation we belong to. My friends’ ages range from late fifties to early twenties and we all gather and eat and drink and discuss everything that is important to us – not just architecture.

It is important to me (and I guess also to my friends) to take pleasure in the small as well as the big things. We feel that huge commissions are not necessarily the path to success. Even if they were, we wouldn’t be interested. Some of the offices you mention have a different approach. They aim to become global and highly visible, which is a different – and valid – approach. I would like to believe that our work as architects, actually any work, can become more meaningful if we have more preoccupations than interests.
At La Tallera, new walls made of concrete airbricks with a geometric pattern partially envelop the old structure, creating an uncertain border and new connections between the existing spaces and inside and outside. (Photo: Rafael Gamo)
- Frida Escobedo was born in Mexico City in 1979. After studying architecture and urbanism at the Universidad Iberoamericana, she went on to get a masters in Art, Design and the Public Domain from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2003 she founded her first office, Perro Rojo, with Alejandro Alarcón and her own studio in 2006.
  
  fridaescobedo.net
Hotel Bocachica in Las Playas, Acapulco, is a 1950s hotel renovation. The renovation used site-specific elements and techniques: locals often customise modernistic ideas, mixing in contemporary tropical handwork. Borrowing from this, Escobedo created a revitalising “formal blend of modern and contemporary elements” including interiors and furniture. (Photos: Undine Pröhl)
You’ve described your interests (or preoccupations) in your own work as being about “the residual and the forgotten: from decadent suburbs that are being subdivided, to rundown tourist spots, to unused roofs and basements” focusing on identifying “forces that change the configuration of cities…central and powerful or marginal, formal or informal.” I like this description very much; can I connect these thoughts directly to Mexico City?

Mexico City has been a place of juxtaposition and sedimentation from very early times. There is no such thing as a tabula rasa. We are always working with some kind of pre-existing condition. Being a young office, we found an opportunity in these kinds of residual spaces: run down residential suburbs, abandoned basements, decaying modernist buildings. It all happened almost accidentally. I could not compete with the big developers who were doing the high-rise apartment and office blocks in the periphery of Santa Fe, or massive social housing. I had to start small, but there was a lot of fabric to play around with. I

ABout Frida Escobedo
District: Coyoacan
Architect: Mario Pani, Enrique del Moral, Juan O'Gorman, Félix Candela et al.
Build: 1948-54
Floor area: 10 km²

Rectory Tower by Enrique del Moral, Salvador Ortega Flores, Mario Pani Darquí, 1950-54. (Photo: Oliver Santana)
Monumental scale is a quality that is characteristic of modern architecture in Mexico, which can in part be associated with pre-Columbian traditions of large platforms and plazas. One of the most spectacular examples of this, actually creating a sense of a city within a city, is the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Construction of the Ciudad Universitaria, situated to the south of the city, commenced between 1948-1954. It is a pioneering work of university planning in Latin America. The master plan was conceived by Mario Pani and Enrique del Moral who coordinated over sixty architects and engineers to turn the campus into a showpiece of modern Mexican architecture mixing strictly rationalist (new internationalist) premises with Mexican specifics such as local materials including volcanic rock, onyx and natural stone. The integration of public art in the form of murals, sculptures, and mosaics spread over the entire campus is also distinctive. Alongside some forty faculties and institutes, a few museums and a central library, the campus also contains a huge Olympic stadium (1952), a cultural centre and its own ecological reserve. Among the many architectural highlights on site, the Cosmic Ray pavilion (by Félix Candela) and the iconic Central Library (by Juan O’Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martinez de Velasco) are the most notable. The campus has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2007. p (fh)
The UNAM University Campus was designed by various architects between 1948-54. (Photo: Oliver Santana)
- Understanding the social, technical and environmental implications of building is essential in today’s networked world. And developing solutions to the problems we have both caused and inherited is the responsibility of all. The Zumtobel Group Award – Innovations for Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environmentencourages and promotes exactly that sense of responsibility and to reward innovative endeavour. In the run up to the announcement of the winners in September 2014, and in collaboration with Zumtobel AG, uncube is presenting, in series, the best of the shortlisted candidates in each of the award’s three categories: Initiatives and Applied Innovations, Buildings and Urban Developments.
  
  zumtobel-group-award.com
  
  zumtobelgroup.com
more
Roden Crater image © James Turrell. (Photo: Florian Holzherr)
Part 1
- In March 2013 the BIQ, a four storey residential building designed by SPLITTERWERK architects, was completed as part of the International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Hamburg. It showcases the first Solar-Leaf façade: a building integrated system absorbing CO₂ emissions, while cultivating microalgae to generate biomass and heat as renewable energy resources. The environment for photosynthesis is provided by glass photobioreactors installed on the southwest and southeast elevations.
  
  The façade utilises the bio-chemical process of photosynthesis for energy efficient buildings and building clusters. There are three main benefits: a) Generation of high-quality biomass for energetic use or as a resource for food and pharmaceutical industry (urban farming), b) generation of solar thermal heat and c) the use as a dynamic shading device. Cultivating microalgae in flat panel photobioreactors requires no additional land-use and is largely independent from weather conditions, allowing installations in urban environments. A floatation device harvests the BIQ’s algal biomass automatically. The carbon required to feed the algae is taken from a combustion process in proximity of the façade installation to implement a short carbon cycle, preventing carbon emissions to contribute to climate change. Microalgae contain high-quality proteins, vitamins and amino acids that make it a valuable resource for the food and pharmaceutical industry.
  
  LINK
- Newly developed bamboo composite materials as reinforcement systems in structural concrete have the potential to revolutionise the concrete building sector. Its advantages over steel are immense; higher tensile capacity, much lower production costs, lighter weight, anti-corrosion and natural renewability. It has the capacity to bind large amounts of CO2 due to bamboo’s fast growth; it is also easily accessible and available for production in developing territories.
  
  At ETH Singapore’s Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) researchers are exploring new types of composite bamboo materials. Bamboo fibre is extracted and mixed with biological based adhesives. With the help of a hot press, a new material can be produced and moulded into a desired shape. It is water resistant, insect and fungi repellent and the mechanical properties such as thermal extension or ductility can be controlled. It can be used for specific applications that best take advantage of the material’s tensile strength, such as reinforcement systems in concrete or beams for ceilings and roof structures.
  
  LINK
- The Lowline will be the world’s first underground park, housed in a trolley terminal that has been vacant since 1948. Using next-generation solar technology and a new approach towards adaptive reuse. James Ramsey, the Lowline’s Co-Founder and Creator, developed a new solar technology system that captures sunlight above ground and funnels it underground through a system of optics. Once underground, the light is then re-distributed, using a reflective canopy, at an intensity that supports photosynthesis. This green technology will not only be a signature design feature of the Lowline, but will also serve as a model for how to light other underground and interior spaces, using solar energy.
  
  The project’s design highlights the historical details of the space, while embracing innovation and the mechanisms of the technology.
  
  LINK
- Category 1 – Applied Innovations
  
  This category was introduced for the first time this year to help drive forward future developments. It includes innovative projects for application in, or around, buildings and urban infrastructure with approaches ranging from saving energy, using new materials or recycling, closed material and resource cycles to intelligent controls and software applications.
  
  It opens up the field of the Zumtobel Group Award to interdisciplinary submissions from technical, research and engineering areas. Five finalists were shortlisted by the jury:
Nominees for Category 1 – Applied Innovations

ABOUT

Photosynthesising Façade

Arup Deutschland GmbH for Solarleaf in Hamburg, Germany

This flat panel bioreactor building skin prototype makes rooftop vegetable gardens look prehistoric. The Solarleaf façade is a building-integrated system based on cultivating microalgae, which absorbs CO2 and generates heat and biomass as renewable resources.

more

High Fibre Futures

Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore / ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Bamboo’s advantages over steel are immense; higher tensile capacity, much lower production costs, lighter weight, anti-corrosion and natural renewability. This new research into bamboo composites could see it become the key reinforcement material of the future.

more

Subterranean Garden

James Ramsey, New York, USA

A project that uses next-generation solar technology to create an underground park in New York. This combination of optics and reflectors can generate enough light to sustain photosynthesis. If it works it could revolutionise urban public space worldwide.

more
- About the Jury
  
  The expert jury panel for the Zumtobel Group Award 2014 includes:
  
  Kunlé Adeyemi – Architect & Urbanist / Founder NLÉ, Amsterdam (NL)
  
  Yung Ho Chang – Architect / Studio FCJZ, Beijing (CN)
  
  Brian Cody – Chair of the Institute of Buildings and Energy, Graz University of Technology (AT)
  
  Winy Maas – Architect / MVRDV, Rotterdam (NL)
  
  Ulrich Schumacher – CEO Zumtobel Group
  
  Kazuyo Sejima – Architect / SANAA, Tokyo (JP)
  
  Rainer Walz – Head of the Competence Center Sustainability and Infrastructure Systems at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI in Karlsruhe
- The evolution and development of prefab-rammed-earth technique has decisive benefits, which result in improved efficiency on-site. Regardless of the weather, scheduling is more reliable because drying takes place in a production hall.
  
  Of particular note is the low energy footprint for the façade, which is about 90% lower than a conventional industrial façade. The material is partly the excavation material or locally sourced within a 10km radius. Building with earth is in itself sustainable, the material and human labour consumes minimal energy and can be recycled after dismantling, as it is not treated with any additives. The earth can be reused without degradation or energy intensive reprocessing, which makes the process genuine recycling, as opposed to standard down cycling. Despite the industrial prefabrication, a high degree of individuality can be achieved through detail work in the production hall, which allows a flexible and variable execution. Furthermore, it challenges creative conduction both architecturally and technically.
  
  LINK
- The KONE UltraRope is a new elevator hoisting technology that eliminates the disadvantages of conventional steel rope and opens up a world of possibilities in high-rise building design by enabling future elevator travel heights of 1 km, twice the distance currently feasible.
  
  Comprised of a carbon fibre core and a unique high-friction coating, KONE UltraRope is extremely light, meaning elevator energy consumption in high-rise buildings can be cut significantly. The drop in rope weight means a dramatic reduction in elevator moving masses and therefore the benefits increase exponentially as travel heights increase. KONE UltraRope is resistant to wear and abrasion. Elevator downtime caused by building sway is also reduced as carbon fibre resonates at a different frequency to steel and most other building materials. Being carbon, the cable has an exceptionally long lifetime, at least twice that of conventional steel rope and with its special coating, no lubrication is required to maintain it.
  
  LINK
- Category 1 – Applied Innovations
  
  This category was introduced for the first time this year to help drive forward future developments. It includes innovative projects for application in, or around, buildings and urban infrastructure with approaches ranging from saving energy, using new materials or recycling, closed material and resource cycles to intelligent controls and software applications.
  
  It opens up the field of the Zumtobel Group Award to interdisciplinary submissions from technical, research and engineering areas. Five finalists were shortlisted by the jury:
Nominees for Category 1 – Applied Innovations

ABOUT

Higher and Higher

KONE, Espoo, Finland

A new ultra lightweight cable with a carbon core and unique high-friction coating to replace conventional steel cable, cutting weight, cost and maintenance. It’s makers claim the KONE Ultra-Rope will enable future elevator travel heights of up to a kilometre.

MORE

Prefab Rammed Earth

Lehm Ton Erde Baukunst GmbH, Schlins, Austria

Precast concrete has been around for over a century. Rammed earth for millennia. Combine the two and the result is a new building with a locally-sourced façade whose energy footprint is 90 per cent lower than a conventional industrial façade.

more
upcoming categories:

BUILDINGS

URBAN DEVELOPMENTS
&
INITIATIVES

THE WINNERS

will be announced in London on the 22nd September
and presented in the October issue of uncube

the jury
District: Miguel Hidalgo
Architect: Gaeta Springall Arquitectos
Build: 2012-2014
Floor area: 15,000 m²

All photos courtesy Gaeta-Springall Arquitectos
- Gaeta-Springall Arcquitectos is a Mexico City-based firm, founded by Julio Gaeta and Luby Springall in 2001. They have won several competitions and have worked in different scales and programs in architecture and urban projects. From the beginning, both have combined professional practice with teaching and research, from the conviction that different platforms complement a better way of doing and thinking. At the end of 2013, the office won the national competition for the Mexican pavilion at the 14^th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, where their exhibition Condemned to be Modern is on view until November 23, 2014.
  
  An exhibition of their work will open July 11, 2014 at the architecture gallery, Aedes, in Berlin.
  
  gaeta-springall.com
  
  aedes-arc.de
Mexico’s drug war accounted for more than 60,000 deaths between 2006 to 2012, with yearly casualty per capita tolls worse than Iraq or Afghanistan. The bloodshed and violence that took over large parts of the country those years marked the controversial, conservative presidency of Felipe Calderón. ¿How do you deal with such a dark, dubious legacy?
Well, you build a memorial. A hasty competition carried out by the local Architects Association that was rejected by some of the citizen organizations that originally supported the project, awarded the project to Julio Gaeta and Luby Springall. Covering 15,000 sqm of Chapultepec Park –on a swath of land owned by the Ministry of Defense, which generated further tension around the project– the memorial is composed of 70 rusted steel slabs scattered among trees, surrounding a central space with a geometric reflection pool. The memorial’s design intentions, unfortunately, haven’t been forceful enough to quiet the controversy surrounding it. Its most significant feature is the fact that people can write on the slabs with chalk, leaving anything from messages to a loved one lost to violence to political slogans rejecting the war. Still, the chalk eventually washes away into nothing, like the voices of the powerless. I (Marios Ballesteros)

ABOUT Gaeta-Springall Arquitectos
This Neurotic
Tradition

The hardware and the software of the city

Text by Michel Rojkind
Michel Rojkind, founding partner of Rojkind Arquitectos, is a Mexico City-based architect who, apart from design, focuses on business tactics and experiential innovation. He calls for a questioning of the idealised condition of programmatic spatial determination in architecture and urban planning, in order to better reflect our rapidly changing societies.

In his book, Fear of Small Numbers, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who teaches at New York University, attempts to explain the processes of globalisation after September 11, 2001. He basically describes a fragmentation of the world into vertebrate and cellular states. The first alludes to the institutions and structures that set order (as with the increasingly outmoded national states, for instance), and the second refers to a world connected by “multiple circuits through which money, news, people (identity) and ideas flow, meet, converge and disperse again”.
For Appadurai, the cellular model addresses a simultaneous flowing of the whole, parallel to the behaviour of organic cells, whilst the vertebrate model, despite all its means, is incapable of supporting a diverse and flexible society – one that is increasingly connected, creating simultaneous evolutions and a constant flow and change.

If we try to apply these thoughts to the fields of architecture and urban planning, it seems that the speed and spontaneity of our changing societies makes a programmatic determination of spaces practically impossible. Thus we have to fundamentally question the idealised condition that architectural practice takes as its starting point; this neurotic tradition that has been passed on from generation to generation of architects. Instead of reproducing the institution’s spaces of control, we have to face the absence of expectation of programmatic control.

One example: we know already about the demographic transitions taking place in Latin America, where a very significant decline in the nuclear family is generating a need for a much broader diversity with respect to rooming schemes. But architecture just keeps on reproducing (on a large scale) homes and housing for traditional nuclear families. And at an urban level, public policies, governmental structures and developers are continuing to define our production of space. When do we change our practice?
- Michel Rojkind is the founding partner of Rojkind Arquitectos, a Mexico City-based architecture firm practicing globally and focusing on design, business tactics and experiential innovation. His work explores architectural solutions, social and urban strategies that positively impact society and the environment. He was also a founding member of MXDF, a collaborative research and urban studies centre devoted to exploring how to modify, transform, negotiate and mould the social, economic, political and cultural limits that shape Mexico City.
  
  rojkindarquitectos.com
Far too often, architecture focuses on criteria of structure and tectonics only. But the principles and values of our society are shown and reflected much more by programmatic compositions, not by the shapes or materials of a building. This is a matter that does not tend to predominate in architectural discussions. Yet it should. We should be questioning this traditional architectural practice accustomed to programming behaviours in a society that we perceive as un-programmable.

The building is only the “hardware”. In the implementation of recreational spaces, devoid of significance or prior ideological representation, we should seek to highlight an unexpected flow of events, where in addition to thinking beyond the programmes that question the clients’ demand, we should try to unleash a cellular form of behaviour. Perhaps the role of architecture in the contemporary context lies in designing platforms for “software” to appear; or imagining architectural programmes that enable the unexpected, without neglecting the possibility of becoming a “non-place” (in the sense of Marc Augé).

It is practically impossible to contain complexities. But in cities such as Mexico City, emergent conditions are a common basis and we are trained tactically to react. If you design spaces for “other things to happen”, they will. They will be used and occupied by people in ways we don’t expect. That is the biggest compliment for any architecture. I

ABOUT michel rojkind
District: Nuevo Polanco
Architect: David Chipperfield with TAAU / Oscar Rodriguez
Build: 2009-13
Floor area: 2,500 m²

All photos: Simon Menges © David Chipperfield Architects
- TAAU was founded in 2004, and is an architecture and urbanism practice and consultancy focused on design and the design development of projects of diverse scales in Mexico and abroad. The firm has won various awards and has ongoing projects in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Queretaro, ranging from housing and urban design to public and cultural buildings.
  
  taau.com.mx
- Since its foundation in 1985, David Chipperfield Architects has developed a diverse international body of work including cultural, residential, commercial, leisure and civic projects as well as masterplanning exercises.
  
  It has won more than 100 international awards and citations for design excellence, including the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2007 (for the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, Germany), and the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award, and the Deutscher Architekturpreis in 2011 (both for the Neues Museum in Berlin).
  
  Practices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai contribute to DCA’s wide range of projects and typologies.
  
  davidchipperfield.co.uk
Museo Jumex houses the most important contemporary art collection in Latin America. Amassed by Eugenio López, wealthy heir to a soft drink fortune, the collection was originally housed on site at the company factory in the gritty outskirts of Mexico City. There is nothing remotely gritty about the new Jumex however. Clad in creamy Jalapa travertine and crowned by a saw-tooth roof that allows natural light to flood the main gallery through skylights, the museum building brings a touch of moderation and constraint to the hot mess of the Nuevo Polanco district. The galleries are perched on top of the more public areas and there are wide-open terraces and a glass-encased “vitrine” for performances, discussions and other public events.

Its stunning interiors include massive pivoting doors, floor-to-ceiling windows, a sculptural black steel staircase and a beautiful Martin Creed marble floor installation in the basement-level bookshop. A sensible building that manages to keep afloat in a sea of crass development, the Jumex is a fittingly grown up contemporary museum for a maturing institution, that has lost most of its hip pretense – and possibly some of its brio – in its determination to earn a spot on the global art circuit. I (Mario Ballesteros)

David Chipperfield Architects

About Taau
Photo courtesy Productora
Refashioning the
Narrative

Conversations on emerging architecture and design practice in Mexico City

Text by Mimi Zeiger

Let’s get this bit out of the way: Mexico City is dense, Mexico City is colourful, and Mexico City is a place of contrasts. That is to say, in a haze of pollution you can eat tapas on the roof of a boutique hotel designed by Enrique Norton – or scoff down quesadillas on the street, sheltered by a tarp hung between a fence and a lamp post. The city’s famous outdoor markets sell local crafts and produce alongside imported Chinese sundries. Icons of Mexican modernism are tangled in an urban fabric dating back centuries. For a number of young architects, designers, and curators practicing in its colonias (neighbourhoods), Mexico City is more than clichéd observation; it’s an opportunity to refashion the narrative.
I. The Garden

Colonia Ampliación Daniel Garza
I’m sitting in the garden of Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura with Regina Pozo. She is director and curator of this private design collection of Mexican architect Fernando Romero and his wife Soumaya Slim, which is housed and exhibited in a modern residence designed in 1952 by Arturo Chavéz Paz. In 2011, Romero garnered attention with the Museo Soumaya, a private institution he designed for his father-in-law, the billionaire Carlos Slim. The towering mushroom-cloud shaped building, clad in metal panels, embodies Romero’s desire to insert a global architectural language into his hometown.
Using pots as an object of design, Pedro & Juana created a living architectural pavilion with plants at the Archivo Diseño y Aquuitectura. (Photo: Onnis Luque)
The flashy museum, however, is not particularly well-loved. With Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura, which opened to the public in 2012 and is housed in a remodelled modern home, Romero and Pozo take a more nuanced approach to historicising the artefacts, employing local designers and writers to help frame a collection of some 1,500 national and international pieces of industrial design and an extensive library of architecture publications.

In the Archivo’s lush oasis, the subject is discourse. “How do we speak about a contemporary Mexico City?” asks Pozo. Her question reflects her restlessness with the twin tropes of Mexican modernism and traditional handicraft, hallmarks the city has yet to overcome. Indeed, the collection’s neighbouring property is Casa Estudio Luis Barragán, the famous architect’s UNESCO-preserved home and pilgrimage site. But across the street is the contemporary art gallery LABOR.

Perhaps to investigate what Mexican design means in a global context, in 2012, Archivo partnered with Domus magazine to launch a competition for a backyard pavilion. Pozo and I are seated on the winning design: an assemblage of ceramic pots designed by Mexican design duo Pedro&Juana. Six hundred pots make up the pavilion: some are filled with earth and plants, others capped to provide seating. Pozo compares the shape of the pots to the Jalisco chimneys used to distill tequila, some of which sit in the Barragán garden next door.
Although the unfinished clay and verdant succulents suggest something rustic or informal, there is nothing ad hoc about the arrangement. Pedro&Juana’s Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo, Mecky Reuss and Gustavo Arroyo, created a digital model to control the placement of each pot and worked closely with local artisans to develop a profile for the clay components.

In a city where labour is cheap and rapid prototyping is still rare, Ruiz Galindo and Reuss walk a line between analogue and digital, between craft and fabrication. Their projects often use specifically designed objects to create larger spatial dynamics. For instance, when David Chipperfield’s marble-clad Museo Jumex opened late last year, across from Museo Soumaya, curator Jose Esparza commissioned Pedro&Juana to create a series of tables for the opening weekend public events. Each table had bendable legs and could transform into benches or, when joined together, create a stage.

The project also included a performance piece entitled Sesiones Puerquito, or pig roast. Throughout the last day of events, the smell of pork drifted through the galleries.

Sesiones Puerquito is one answer to Pozo’s question of what is a contemporary design discourse in Mexico City. By introducing the communal ritual of roasting a pig on an outdoor terrace and eating it in the halls of Chipperfield’s refined museum, the architects used design to wryly insert everyday practice into the pageantry of global cultural enterprise. Is it subversion or a celebration of the local? It’s hard to know, but Reuss smiles when he admits that pork fat dribbled onto the marble terrace.
2. The Rooftop

Colonia Cuauhtémoc
In a penthouse conference room atop a nondescript office building, architect Francisco Pardo gives me a brief overview of manufacturing in Mexico over the last three decades: the economic hit the country took as manufacturing moved to Asia in the 1990s and demand from the north dried up, the subsequent slump in innovation and abundant low-skill labour force, and the more recent re-emergence of artisanal handicraft for design objects. Pardo’s interests, however, lie with the lowly concrete block, a construction material ubiquitous across the city and across Latin America.

Pardo founded the firm AT103 with Julio Amezcua in 2001. Although The Architecture League in New York named them an Emerging Voices winner in 2009, the multidisciplinary practice is part of an established generation of Mexican architects, which includes Michel Rojkind and Derek Dellekamp. The firm is currently developing a staggeringly comprehensive plan for housing and mixed use development above all the metro stations in Mexico City.
Formed by grey mobile tabicón blocks, Pabellón El Eco by Frida Escobedo encourages visitors to move, play and interact with the architectural installation. (Photo: Rafael Gamo)
The broad scheme would establish criteria for densification along transit routes and incentives for developers to embark upon considered designs.

In the 2013 book Architecture Does (Not) Matter, AT103 chronicle their housing project Lisboa 7 through photographs, analytical drawings, and essays. It is an ode to the concrete block, and an investigation into how reducing architecture to fundamentals allowed the firm to radically reinterpret housing. Their scheme breaks down the massing into six narrow buildings, each honeycombed with courtyards and windows for maximum light and ventilation. “Form follows strategy”, Pardo quips. The blocks were left bare to reduce the cost of the enlarged exterior envelope.

There’s something deeply resonant in a generation of architects embracing the austerity of a heavy, modular building component. At the height of Mexico’s housing boom, track after track of bunker-like houses built from concrete blocks sprawled out of the cities.

In 2010 architect Frida Escobedo created an installation of concrete blocks at Museo Experimental El Eco. She filled the museum’s courtyard with layers of grey blocks, which could be restacked by viewers/users to create seating or surfaces. Escobedo critiqued the very genteel notion of a pavilion, by asking viewers to participate as complicit labourers in the courtyard construction.

Escobedo also celebrated blocks in her design for La Tallera de Siqueiros, a renovation of the home and studio of artist and activist David Alfaro Siqueiros in Cuernavaca. She used a tall perimeter wall made of unfinished perforated blocks to unify a collection of freestanding buildings dating from the mid-sixties. Her skilful wrapping of the complex is not about fetishising the informal. If anything, it’s about affect: concrete latticework produces plays of light and shadow. In an act of calculated redundancy, her pattern of triangle-shaped openings repeats and repeats until it pushes past any informal reference – decoration on the cheap – and hovers on the op-art threshold between atmosphere and abstraction.
Foros Azteca by AT103 (Photo: Enrique Macias)

Pabellón El Eco by Frida Escobedo (Photo: Rafael Gamo)

Lisboa 7 by AT103 (Photo: Rafael Gamo)
3. The Street

Colonia Roma Sur
The offices of architectural practice Productora are located above the city grid in one of Mexico City’s earliest high-rises, a wedge of international style designed by Augusto H. Alavarez and Juan Sordo Madaleno. Architects Abel Perles, Carlos Bedoya, Victor Jaime, and Wonne Ickx founded the practice in 2006. (And have their own tower currently under construction, the CAF Headquarters in Caracas, Venezuela, a 36-storey monolith sitting on a gridded base.) From their wedge-shaped penthouse perch on the top floor, the four architects create designs with astounding geometric precision.
More than just a library on wheels, the Mobile Art Library A47 by Productora uses a transparent faςade to actively attract prospective readers within its urban context. (Photo: Luis Gallard)
Recycled house in Tlayacapan, Morelos

Mobile Art Library, A47

Mobile Art Library, A47, by night
All projects by Productora (Photos: Enrique Macias)
- Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based journalist and critic, covering architecture, art, urbanism and design.
  
  mimizeiger.com
In 2011, Productora joined forces with art curator Ruth Estevez and opened LIGA, Space for Architecture, a gallery dedicated to the work of Latin American architects, in the small lobby of their office building on Insurgentes Avenue. In exhibiting architecture from designers based in Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico, the curators set forth a clear agenda: to engage in architectural discourse all the way from the US/Mexico border to the South Pole. Over the past three years, they’ve produced thirteen exhibitions and a number of public events.

LIGA’s curators relish the initiative’s smallness, but like Archivo, they possess a desire to operate outside of the local, to scale up. When LIGA was invited by José Esparza to participate in the 2013 Architecture Triennial in Lisbon, Portugal, they asked the Mexico City-based practice MMX Studio to create an installation in the second floor gallery of MUDE (Museum of Design and Fashion of Lisbon). MMX Studio is a collective composed of architects Jorge Arvizu, Diego Ricalde, Emmanuel Ramírez, and Ignacio Del Rio.

Entitled Coexistences, their piece reproduced LIGA’s footprint some thirty times within the larger Lisbon gallery. In the piece, the physical space of the LIGA gallery (outlined in deep vermilion fabric) was treated as modular, not unlike a ceramic pot or brick, and iterated accordingly, illustrating the small gallery’s potential reach.

LIGA’s executive director Marielsa Castro walks me through the current exhibition; on view is work by Argentine architect Diego Arraigada – he’s built an armature to connect the gallery’s two windows. She guides me outside and points to the building’s original sign, which reads Liga de Bíblica: Bible League. Now, the catechism is architectural. Still, it is hard not to take pleasure in how Arraigada’s inside-out/outside-in installation perfectly frames the taco vendor grilling up carnitas and tortillas. I

ABOUT MIMI ZEIGER
- Nuno Cera (*1972 Beja, Portugal) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.  He is a photographer and video artist, addressing spatial conditions, architecture and urban situations through fictional and poetic documentary forms.
  
  The Futureland project is accompanied by a catalogue, published in 2010.
  
  (See also his project Prora featured in uncube no.14 Small Towns, Big Architecture)
  
  nunocera.com
Futureland: Mexico City

Initiated in 2008, Futureland is an artistic urban research project by Nuno Cera, in which he examines nine megacities on four continents, including Mexico City. Using video and photography, Cera captures the social, spatial, and architectural effects that the tremendous urban growth has had over the recent 20 years. By putting his impressions next to each other, he is not trying to compare these very different urban organisms but rather to create an impressive collage of our current – and future – living conditions: Futureland. I (fh)

ABOUT NUNO CERA

Photo and video © Nuno Cera
District: Nuevo Polanco
Architect: FR-EE Fernando Romero
Build: 2005-11
Floor area: 16,000 m²

Photo courtesy Museo Soumaya
- Founded in Mexico in 2000 by Fernando Romeo, FR-EE (Fernando Romero Enterprise) seeks to translate the contemporary moment and culture through architecture, using state of the art materials and technologies, supported by thorough, comprehensive research, and collaboration with other disciplines. In 2010, FR-EE opened an office in New York.
  
  Founder Fernando has won numerous awards, including the Honorary Fellowship by AIA – American Institute of Architects, the Bauhaus Award (2004/2005) and Mexican Society of Architects Award (2009). Romero has lectured at Columbia University, and is a member of the AIA-American Institute of Architects and CAMSAM-Mexican Chamber of Architects.
  
  fr-ee.org
Opened in 2011 with a great deal of expectation and fanfare, the Museo Soumaya is the showpiece and driver of one of the most extreme urban regeneration schemes in the city’s recent history: an ambitious plan led by Carlos Slim – a telecom tycoon and one of the richest people on the planet – to convert a former industrial site close to the city centre into a thriving residential, commercial and cultural destination. At the heart of the Nuevo Polanco district, the building is surrounded by upscale shopping malls and office buildings, a new aquarium, the Jumex Museum, a theatre designed by Antón García-Abril and soon, the new U.S. Embassy complex. The Soumaya is by far the most staggering of the bunch.

The corset-shaped structure, covered by a metallic honeycomb skin, was designed by Slim’s son-in-law, architect Fernando Romero, to house an eclectic collection of painting, sculpture, decorative arts and antique coins. With its whopping 20,000 square metres of exhibition space, divided over five floors connected by a long spiralling ramp, the inside feels more shopping mall than world class museum. The Soumaya has been shunned by critics, but it has proven pretty popular with the public – particularly as a backdrop for Instagram selfies. I (Mario Ballesteros)

ABOUT FR-EE
Collage of selfies at Museo Soumaya as published on Instagram
district: Benito Juarez
ARCHITECT: Rojkind arquitectos
BUILD: 2011-14
FLOOR AREA: 49,000 m^₂

Photo: Jaime Navarro © Rojkind arquitectos
- Michel Rojkind is the founding partner of Rojkind Arquitectos, a Mexico City based architecture firm practicing globally and focusing on design, business tactics and experiential innovation. His work explores architectural solutions, social and urban strategies that positively impact society and the environment. He was also a founding member of MXDF, a collaborative research and urban studies centre devoted to exploring how to modify, transform, negotiate and mould the social, economic, political and cultural limits that shape Mexico City.
  
  www.rojkindarquitectos.com
A few weeks ago, in the middle of a typical Mexico City spring downpour, the screening rooms, bathrooms and hallways of the spanking new Cineteca Nacional, the national film archive designed by Michel Rojkind, morphed into a series of waterfalls and wading pools. The flooding was the latest in a string of scandals that has surrounded the project, due to a rushed opening pushed by political interests. Rojkind’s addition to the four monoliths of Manuel Rocha’s retro-cool, 1984 original, is full of the formal bravado of most of his work: a massive roof canopy clad with a triangular lattice, darts out from the four new screening rooms all the way to the earlier buildings, covering the entire complex under a space-age cloak.

Photo: Alec Perkins
But the project’s smartest gestures have to do more with refocusing the original site programme to recover floor area and create new public spaces: for example, compressing the old parking lot into a six-storey building to gain space for greenery and an outdoor amphitheatre. These achievements make up for some of the project’s constructive shortcomings, and have transformed the Cineteca from an obscure and, to a certain extent, desolate space for hardcore arthouse film buffs, to a popular cultural destination that feels open and democratic enough to draw a wider audience to its celluloid treasures. I (Mario Ballesteros)

ABOUT ROJKIND ARQUITECTOS
District: Cuauhtémoc
Architect: AT103 / Francisco Pardo
and Julio Amezcua
Build: 2006-10
Floor area: 2,700 m²

All drawings: AT103 Architects, all photos: Rafael Gamo
- AT103 was founded in 2001 by Julio Amezcua and Francisco Pardo, with the aim of researching and creating new techniques for architectural development and construction in the contemporary city. They have developed projects on different scales, from houses, residential buildings, offices, cultural spaces and television stages to the Ave Fenix Fire station.
  
  In 2010 they were awarded a silver medal in the 2010 Mexican Architecture Biennial and the Pan-American Architecture Biennial in Quito’s Grand Prize for their Lisboa 7 apartment building.
  
  at103.com
With more and more people relocating from Mexico’s rural areas to Mexico City, the demand for new housing has been constantly increasing. As the city seems to have reached it’s limits (already crawling up the mountains around it), the focus is now on looking to redevelop former industrial areas and redensifying others close to the city centre. A major focus for the latter is along one of the city’s most important avenues, the Paseo de la Reforma, which is undergoing major changes, with new luxury apartments, retail and office spaces.

For AT103 architects, the question was what to do with the parcels of land and buildings adjacent to these new developments. Could low and middle income earners who were living there already, remain and also be part of the boom in their neighbourhood, instead of having to leave the area? Lisboa 7 thus tried to create affordable, decent and not cheap-looking residential spaces:
“We developed a building that is as densely populated as possible by splitting up the maximum density allowed into six volumes.”

Each volume is 3.6 metres wide with a 4 metre gap in between, allowing for cross-ventilation and light. The project consists of sixty living modules of 36 square metres each (the required minimum for a housing unit in Mexico City) and the different types of apartments range from one to four modules (36 to 144 square metres). The building has five levels and only two corridors, on the second and fourth floors, where the entrances to the between one and three-storey units are located. Each module has a free plan and a service area with water supply for either a kitchen or bathroom and can be programmed to suit each user’s preferences. The materials are the basic construction materials: breeze block and exposed concrete for the structure, with no further finishings. I (ltv+fh)

ABOUT AT103
- Héctor Zamora (*1974, Mexico City) is a São Paulo-based artist whose work visualises the relationship between past and present. Working across various mediums, re-contextualising the physical properties of weight and balance, gravity and buoyancy, Zamora creates geometries from histories. Yet because his projects are ephemeral, these materialised connections are never fixed in space or time. Rather, their physical fluctuations mirror the caprices of history, illuminating and suggesting ways of reconstructing the past by reconsidering the present.
  
  lsd.com.mx
Hypars Intersections

To be a Latin American artist is to be trapped in a double-bind of marginality: either tasked with consistently challenging the Western art historical canon, or accused of remaining confined within it. Born in Mexico City, the artist Héctor Zamora confronts this problem in a number of ways via his installation works.

One of his tactics is to flaunt the expectation of working directly with his cultural heritage by focusing on universals: geometric forms, mathematical truths, expressive colours, natural phenomena. This can be seen in works like his recent Hypars Intersections series, shown at the Zona Maco fair in 2014, in which concrete has been moulded to form a series of delicate origami-like shapes and then presented in a series of permutations on a wooden display rack. Emperors of form like Donald Judd might be impressed; but so would Oscar Niemeyer. I (ew)

ABOUT Héctor Zamora
Photo: “Hypars Intersections” series, 2014 © Héctor Zamora
Blowing
in

the Wind

Mexico City’s problems need better answers

Text by Tatiana Bilbao

Photography by Pablo López Luz
Mexico City’s population began exploding exponentially in the 1950s and it now has an estimated greater urban population of some 20 million. Architect Tatiana Bilbao shares her thoughts on the energy and pollution issues that ensued in what became one of the world’s biggest, and dirtiest, cities.

I grew up during Mexico City’s demographic explosion in the sixties and seventies, alongside the increasing insecurity, lack of control, and massively elevated levels of pollution that came with it. Although population growth continues, the further spread of the city is limited, situated as it is in the middle of a large valley surrounded by mountains, so density can only increase along with the concomitant problems involved.

In the nineties the city’s “planners” (and I mark them with quotes here, since planners do not “plan” but respond to the existing, which has been created organically by society), focused their ideas on how to stop or reduce the levels of pollution.
Images from Pablo López Luz's ongoing series: “Terrazo”
- Tatiana Bilbao was born in Mexico City in 1972 where she still lives and works today. She studied architecture and urbanism at Universidad Iberoamericana, graduating in 1996, after which she worked as an advisor for urban projects at the Housing and Development Department. In 2004 she opened her own office: Tatiana Bilbao SC, which has since completed projects in China, France, Spain and Mexico. In 2004 she also co-founded the urban research centre MXDF along with architects Derek Dellekamp, Arturo Ortiz Struck and Michel Rojkind.
  
  tatianabilbao.com
- Pablo López Luz (b. Mexico City, 1979) is a photographer and artist. He completed his MFA at New York University in 2006, and has exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City), Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Mexico City), and Centro Fotográfico Alvarez Bravo (Oaxaca, Mexico).
  
  These images are taken from his series Terrazo where he wants to “re-interpret the classical notion of Mexican landscape through a more contemporary view” on the manipulated and constructed landscapes he finds within Mexico’s larger cities as well as on the countryside.
  
  pablolopezluz.com
Solutions were as diverse as implementing a programme that involved leaving your car at home one day a week (Hoy no circula) to ambitious urban plans for relocating industry and closing the majority of “dirty” companies within the city centre.

One of the most creative solutions of the time was a proposal by a renowned engineer, Heberto Castillo (1928-1997), best known as a left-wing political activist for workers’ rights following the 1968 student protests and for his invention of Tridilosa, a lightweight structure that combined thin rods of steel with concrete to build very large, but very light, slabs that were used all over the country.

Castillo proposed installing one hundred giant ventilators in the city to simply blow the polluted air away from the valley. His idea was to construct gas burners on the ground to elevate the temperature of the polluted air and then to dig holes through the hills and install huge fourteen-metre-wide ventilators to create the necessary movement of wind to expel the contaminated air. He calculated that when the system was on, the pollution would decrease to levels that where no longer harmful to human beings within sixty hours of operation.

Although the proposal lacked clarity and was more utopian than feasible, it ended up not only being part of the collective discussion, but even became part of the political agenda in the year it was proposed (1992).

Today’s hot issue obsessing the planners is water: the mayor wants to install a wind park to allow the city to produce its own energy for pumping the water it needs from the neighbouring valley. It’s a nice idea, but everyone seems to have forgotten that there simply isn’t enough airflow across Mexico City.

This is a city that has grown organically, and whose wealth of problems is as large as its population, it will take a very big wind to blow all its problems away – and maybe wind is simply not enough. I

ABOUT tatiana bilbao

About Pablo López Luz
In the Photo Booth with ...

Luby Springall & Julio Gaeta

We have to start with a confession: We didn’t meet these two Mexico City-based architects in our usual Berlin photo booth, but in Venice, where they have curated this year’s Mexican Pavilion. Condemned to be Modern is not only a comprehensive exhibition, but Springall and Gaeta have also produced an incredibly dense catalogue showcasing more than 100 years of modern architecture in Mexico.

Interview by Florian Heilmeyer

Photographs by Rob Wilson
Why is your exhibition called “Condemned to be Modern”?

Julio: The title is a quote from the Mexican poet Octavio Paz: “wanting to be modern seems like madness, we are condemned to be modern.” He was one of the most influential Mexican intellectuals who analysed modernity, and described best how tradition and modernity have always been in opposition to each other; he is basically saying that we are always modern, no matter what we do, there is no choice. Modernity is not an attitude, nor a style. We are living in our time, so we are “condemned to be modern”. This was a great starting point for our research on tradition and modernity in Mexico’s 20th century architecture.
In his concept of “Absorbing Modernity” for this year’s Biennale, Rem Koolhaas stated that “national identity has been sacrificed to modernity”. Is that true for Mexico?

Julio: In Mexico there has always been a strong dynamic between the two opposing forces of tradition and modernity, constantly struggling with, yet influencing, each other. They fused and mixed, creating a dynamic duality. This constantly changing mixture has created some very specific characteristics not only in Mexican architecture, but in our entire cultural history. We hope to show that in our book and our exhibition here in Venice. But we also suggest a critique, an open question, if you like, about how far there was continuity (or a break) between the heroic modernistic movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the contemporary practice of architecture.
Was this heroic modernity an imported concept that entered Mexico from the outside?

Luby: Yes, to a certain extent. Speaking of architecture, there were a lot of European and US-American influences. Just like in all open countries in the world, I guess. Yet Mexico had, like many Latin American countries, totally different circumstances under which modernity evolved. For instance, we were not part of the world wars that destroyed many parts of the world, and we had a pretty stable socialist government for almost 70 years. When European countries were beginning to question and reject their traditions, most Latin American countries were discussing what their traditions were: colonial, pre-colonial or post-colonial? I think that this is also why modernism in these countries was mixed so much with pre-colonial elements. Especially in Mexico, we have a very rich culture, thousands of years old. A very strong DNA, so to speak, with which we work. We have a huge vocabulary that has been integrated into or influenced our “Tropical Modernism”.
- Gaeta-Springall Arcquitectos is a Mexico City-based firm, founded by Julio Gaeta and Luby Springall in 2001. They have won several competitions and have worked in different scales and programmes in architecture and urban projects. From the beginning, both have combined professional practice with teaching and research, from the conviction that different platforms complement a better way of doing and thinking. At the end of 2013, the office won the national competition for the Mexican pavilion at the 14^th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, where their exhibition Condemned to be Modern is on view until November 23, 2014.
  
  An exhibition of their work will open July 11, 2014 at the architecture gallery, Aedes, in Berlin.
  
  gaeta-springall.com
  
  aedes-arc.de
Would you call yourselves modern architects?

Julio: Yes of course. We are condemned to be modern anyway, right? We don’t have a choice. But also because we live and work in Mexico City, which I think is a truly modern city. It features all these different mixtures of modernity and tradition, which the city is very open-minded to. That’s also why I think it is the most beautiful city in the world.

Luby: I agree. But it is also tragic in a way that everything in Mexico is still so focused on it – politically, economically, culturally – compared with other big cities like Monterrey, Guadalajara and Tijuana. And as for the most beautiful city in the world, I’d say London!

About Gaeta-Springall arquitectos