Lines of research

The Laboratory of Editions in Architecture works with an initial group of five lines of research focused on the twentieth century. These lines of research have been defined and chosen for their usefulness in analyzing ideas about Mexican architecture of the period, its relationship with other disciplines, and its interactions with the architectural cultures of other countries. They have also been chosen for their value in learning, that is, for enabling the laboratory's students to acquire basic research skills and knowledge.

Our lines of research allow work with institutional or private archives ranging from large to small. Some of these archives are professionally cataloged—the larger ones—while others, due to their private nature, lack a systematic organization. 

This diversity enables our students to be capable and prepared to conduct research under a variety of conditions, reflecting the way research is practiced in the national and international professional spheres. The lines of research allow students to work with libraries, newspaper archives, sound archives, and film archives that also vary in scale and circumstances: from large public institutions to small private or semi-private collections. Another characteristic of the lines of research is that their archives are reasonably accessible: some are completely open, while others can be consulted with relatively simple authorizations. Students learn the procedures for accessing many of the sources on which they will base their research.

5 lines of research 

The concept and image of Mexican Olympic architecture were largely designed for the media. Long before the buildings for the sporting events were finished and habitable in October 1968, the citizens of Mexico City were prepared—thanks to this concept and image—to use and behave appropriately within that architecture. Half a century after their construction, many Mexicans still perceive the Olympic buildings—and the transformed city around them—through the lens of the image designed since 1964 by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, his head of publications Beatrice Trueblood, and their team. This image—and the ideas of city, architecture, and society that underpinned it—was clearly expressed and explained in the numerous publications—books, magazines, brochures, postcards, posters, postage stamps, and so on—printed for the XIX Olympic Games. This line of research aims to contribute to the understanding of the development of the media culture in which we live today and the changes in the ways we experience and use architecture. 

The way in which Olympic architecture and urban planning have transformed entire cities—and their cultures—remains a largely understudied topic. While some isolated buildings designed by renowned architects have been included in the recent history of the discipline, these enormous urban-architectural events as a whole have been studied only exceptionally. As on other occasions, the transformation of Mexico City into a megalopolis was largely driven by the celebration of the Olympic Games. Monumental works, infrastructure, and artistic and cultural programs expanded its physical and imagined boundaries, and produced new and more complex ways of experiencing and understanding its urban condition. This research aims to show how the design of the Olympic program—conceived by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and executed by his large team of architects, graphic designers, and artists—constructed a complex image for locals and foreigners alike of how the experience of the new Olympic architecture and city should be lived. Through interaction with a selection of books, posters, pamphlets, and magazines—out of the millions published—we will attempt to compare the built architecture, its image in the media, and its contribution to culture. 

Academics such as Beatriz Colomina, Mario Carpo, and Juan José Lahuerta have studied the relationship between print media and modern architecture, explaining how many of the most important architects of the twentieth century concealed, beneath a discourse of respect for materials and structural sincerity (and many other moral principles), a profound interest in the mediated existence of architecture. But unlike the architecture of the Modern Movement, the Mexican Olympic buildings were designed more for satellite broadcast to a live television audience than for the masses on-site, as Ramírez Vázquez cynically stated when questioning the limited capacity of some of the Olympic venues. In just two years, the Mexican Olympic Committee's publications program produced a series of publications that expressed how the government wanted to be perceived locally and internationally through design and architecture. These widely distributed publications explained how to live in and interpret the buildings—both new and recycled—the highways, and the city: a new, complex urban and national culture that placed Mexico within a broader international context, creating a false image of a neutral and peaceful country during the Cold War. 

1968 marks the culmination of the transformation process in Western societies regarding new values ​​such as sexual freedom and diversity, a fragile anti-racist consensus, pacifism, anti-authoritarianism, and ecological awareness, among others. These ideas and values ​​were present in the social and political demonstrations and demands. Throughout this research, the multiple and contradictory discourses developed and designed by the Mexican Olympic Committee before, during, and after the Games will be compared with contemporary architecture, urban planning, and artistic realities. In the current political and cultural context, it is particularly important to reflect on the strength—or fragility—of the humanistic consensus achieved 50 years ago. We believe that through these studies we will contribute to the debate on how architecture and design have shaped contemporary urban culture and values.

The significant urban expansion resulting from Mexican Olympic architecture has been little studied in depth. The study of the relationships, negotiations, and contradictions between sports and cultural venues and the

Clara Porset, one of Mexico's most important industrial designers, had a seemingly brief presence in the media. However, she lived in close connection with several of the most important figures in Mexican, Cuban, American, and other international media culture. Her political stance placed her at some of the most significant events of the twentieth century, such as the Cárdenas era and the Cuban Revolution. Nevertheless, to this day, with a few exceptions, the knowledge generated from Clara Porset and her projects is limited to a collection of powerful images of furniture with extraordinarily seductive formal and material characteristics. This project will analyze the relationships and contradictions between the Clara Porset archive and library at the Center for Research in Industrial Design at UNAM and the media representations of the designer's work and thought. This research will analyze the relationship between design thinking and material culture at a specific historical moment. Furthermore, in this case, it will experiment with archival material—texts, photographs, graphics, models—and the ways in which this material can manifest itself in contemporary media. Awareness and careful observation of the development of discourses in the present, and monitoring their evolution over time, will shape an epistemological horizon for knowledge construction.

What did design exhibitions in Mexico signify?

The most extreme and influential proposals in the history of modern architecture were developed within the context of temporary exhibitions.

Beatriz Colomina

In the important exhibitions that Clara Porset developed in Mexico, we can observe many of the common media and museum strategies of modernity. However, we can also find more complex strategies for reconciling the discourses of Cuban and Mexican nationalism, ideas about Californian identity, and industrial design in countries with a poorly—or almost nonexistent—industry. How do the exhibitions curated by an industrial designer educated in the United States and Europe fit into the universe of modern exhibitions—both Mexican and from other countries? How did she leverage the knowledge gained from participating in exhibitions like Organic Design and those she curated herself? Clara Porset curated and participated in exhibitions whose historical significance is yet to be determined.

Who designed the objects in this country?

By reviewing the periodicals from the time when Porset was most active, we can observe a context in which the mass production of objects—or Mexican industrial design—was much larger than the history of the discipline—with rare exceptions—has shown to date. In some articles from twentieth century architecture magazines, we can see that Porset wasn't the only one designing furniture for the most important companies and architects of the time: there were many furniture and object design companies that still need to be analyzed. But if Porset and the other designers we can identify today—like Michael van Beuren and Arturo Pani—were responsible for designing and producing the objects required by the most important and powerful, who was responsible for designing and mass-producing the anonymous furniture—until now—for the thousands of hospitals, schools, government buildings, and so on, used by the majority? How did industrial objects (and handcrafted ones, whose creators we don't know) enter the public eye, and how did their representation modify their production and the way we use and perceive them?

Clara Porset, an architect?

The Clara Porset archive contains unpublished manuscripts that reveal an industrial designer with an extraordinary and profound vision of architecture. In some of these documents, such as the Havana lectures of the late 1940s, Porset develops a solidly structured theory of architecture, revealing the thinking of a mature architect based on a deep understanding of architectural history. How did this sophisticated architectural thinking relate to the industrial design developed by Clara Porset, and to her theory? Why has her architectural knowledge—equal to, and sometimes superior to, that of most architects of her time—never been discussed? How did she come to develop this broad and complex architectural knowledge? The boundaries between disciplines that we assume to be precisely defined appear flexible and blurred in this designer's archival material. Her thinking allowed her to shape and interact limited fields of knowledge according to how she believed problems—of design or of

The most important ideas in twentieth century Mexican architecture were not defined exclusively by architects and publications from our country. From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, foreign books and journals on Mexican architecture have significantly shaped the image and structure of our discipline. This role of foreign publications—particularly those from the United States—has only been superficially investigated.

Modern architecture was not immune to this process. It wasn't until Esther Born, an American architect and photographer, published The New Architecture in Mexico (1937) with The Architectural Record (and William Morrow) that the objectives, goals, identity, and image of modern Mexican architecture—both internationally and internally—were more or less clearly defined for the first time. The importance of this book and its visual and cultural discourse transcends our borders and our relationship with the United States. In the historical context of its publication, Mexico sought to present itself to the world as a modern nation that had embraced progress and left behind the turbulent years of its revolution. Meanwhile, the United States had begun its process of consolidating its position as the world's leading power and establishing cultural dominance over its allies, particularly Latin American countries. In this sense, The New Architecture in Mexico is much more than a catalog of photographs that defines those who would become the "heroes" of our modern architecture (José Villagrán, Juan O'Gorman, Luis Barragán, and Enrique Yáñez, already skilled masters of print media) and their architectural discourses supposedly stemming from the Revolution and our ancestral history.

Like the most important European and American books on modern architecture—which functioned (and still function) as sophisticated technological devices for expressing and disseminating a particular way of seeing and controlling the world through the design and construction of buildings—Esther Born's book inaugurates a long tradition of American publications that have been defining the identity of Latin America in general, and of several of its countries in particular, since the last century.

The book The New Architecture in Mexico is the first major essay and the catalyst for the publication of some of the most important books on modern Mexican architecture, such as Irving Evan Myers's Mexico's Modern Architecture (1952) and Max Cetto's Modern Architecture in Mexico (1961). On a broader scale, Born's book may have been the basis for other important books on modern Latin American architecture published by outside authors and publishers, such as Brazil Builds (1943) by Philip Lippincot and George E. Kidder Smith, Latin American Architecture since 1945 (1955) by Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and perhaps even (much more recently), Latin America in Construction (2015) by Barry Bergdoll.

Max Cetto arrived in Mexico City in 1939, and in 1961—22 years later—he published the book Modern Mexican Architecture. Initially a bilingual German-Spanish edition, it was later transformed into a two-version edition: one German and English, and the other simultaneous, English and Spanish. The edition was published by Gerd Hatje of Stuttgart, in agreement with Praeger of New York. During the 23 years he had lived in Mexico City, the German-born architect had become acclimatized and even a naturalized Mexican citizen. He had participated in important architectural experiments and was part of the circle of the country's most outstanding architects and artists.

The Cetto family preserves the archive of the author's correspondence with the German and American publishers. It consists of hundreds of fragile and faded pages that bear witness to the numerous negotiations involved in bringing a publishing project of this nature to fruition. These negotiations reveal a series of expectations from the German perspective and Max Cetto's intention to highlight a particular version of what he considered proper Mexican architecture, as an example to the world, within the complex international context of the second half of the 1950s.

The analysis of this book and the history behind its creation is fundamental and will provide many guidelines for the study of twentieth century Mexican architecture. The book is a photographic record of the state of modern architecture in Mexico City in the 1950s and continues a series of books that portray the evolution of the discipline in the twentieth century. However, its value extends beyond its documentary value as a record of architecture. The book's critical discourse marks a crucial moment of crisis in the language of modern architecture, which Cetto clearly identifies, using the same terms as authors who have subsequently identified with this crisis. In a rather original discourse within the more classic and repetitive interpretations of the history of Mexican architecture – made by Mexicans – it also reflects the point of view of an architect forged in the very heart of the modern movement in the CIAM and in the Das Neue Frankfurt group to which Cetto belonged in his youth.

Since the founding of the Royal Academy of San Carlos in the late eighteenth century, a significant library for the institutionalized teaching and learning of architecture and the other arts began to take shape in our country, an endeavor that continued throughout the nineteenth century. With the creation in 1929 of the National School of Architecture (ENA) and the National School of Fine Arts (ENAP), the collection continued to grow, expanding upon the path begun by the Academy by acquiring publications, mostly from the United States and Europe, which necessarily influenced building construction and the transformation of the city. Likewise, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first specialized architectural publications were created both within the institution (and from outside), addressing some of the key questions of the time. Despite the library's fragmentation across various stages and institutions, a significant portion of the academic library's bibliographic and periodical materials are housed in the Reserved Collection of the current Lilia Guzmán Library at the Faculty of Architecture of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and these materials have yet to be researched.

Since July 2019, LEA and a team motivated by the desire to rescue the printed architectural and urban history contained in publications from the Faculty of Architecture's predecessor institutions began undertaking the necessary steps: from the physical labor of carrying boxes of books and journals and arranging the publications on the shelves, to the development of an academic project for the creation of AEReA (Spanish acronym for Acervo experimental de registros de arquitectura). Fernanda Barrera, a professor in the Faculty of Architecture, and a team of students completing their community service from the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, with the approval of the Coordination of Libraries and Archives, carried out actions to rescue and document the materials and proposed potential lines of research for future projects.

Initially, the goal was to properly catalog all the publications (which had already been selected by the previous library team from 1987 to 2018, in what was called the reserved collection). This work—which remained unfinished—documented the editorial, material, and content characteristics of each publication. In addition, books requiring conservation treatment were identified, and other publications on the library's open shelves that could be key to understanding print media and their role within architectural culture were added to the collection. Thus, as the materials began to be examined, questions arose on various topics that can be explored further over time.

*The Graham Foundation grant can be found at:

http://www.grahamfoundation.org/grantees/5861-1968-mexico-s-olympic-architecture-and-city-through-print-media