Tradition / identity in modern Mexican architecture

Tradition/identity - a binomial interpretable and interpreted in infinite ways in all fields, has perhaps its most visible application in architecture. Whether the reading, interpretation and appropriation of tradition is carried out at a primary level or at an extremely elevated and sublimated one, architecture allows us an instant "reading" of the built object.

In every country in the world, architectural tradition has had and still has, if not a strong say, at least an influence, often at the subconscious level, in modern and contemporary architectural manifestations.

Modern Mexican Mexican architecture owes many of its now iconic elements to the pre-Hispanic architectural tradition and the viceregate period.

In the early part of the 20th century, the Mexican state's programmatic desire to create a national architecture was realized by Mexican architects especially through the appeal to the architectural typology of the Viceregato period, in which cultured and vernacular Hispanic architecture was grafted onto Mexican soil. At the same time, after the Revolution of 1910 and the entire decade of political turmoil that followed, it continued to phase with what was happening internationally at the time. The Art Deco phenomenon, grafted onto a decorative vocabulary of its own, constitutes a remarkable built backdrop in the major cities. However, the modern international style, which was masterfully practiced in major buildings, seemed to move away from the traditional elements, seeking a greater "alignment" with what was happening in architecture worldwide.

Spared the upheavals of the Second World War - from which it was able to benefit through the sale of oil to the USA and thus the state had the money for major investments in infrastructure and public buildings in the late 1940s and early 1950s - Mexican architecture began, with the fifth decade of the last century, to find an identity based, this time, more on the pre-Hispanic tradition. An identity exemplified by a few representatives of Mexican architecture - whose work successfully crossed the borders of Mexico - until the 1990s when, unfortunately, globalization began to reach this field as well, with very few exceptions.

Tradition is present on many levels, the use of traditional elements is carried out from the macro to the micro level, and the examples below, from Mexico City, will explain this. This is by no means a word-for-word take-over of urban or architectural typology, but a synthesis and reuse of the characteristics of pre-Hispanic urbanism and architecture.

A perfect example is the University City in the capital Mexico City, whose central site, to which I will refer, was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2007 because it "possesses profound values of universal exceptionality of the culture of Mexico".

Read the full text in issue 3/2013 of Arhitectura magazine