An Exercise in Cultural Give-and-Take

Stepping into the market square of Mexico’s elegant and historic city of Patzcuaro, UCLA architecture student Sheila Spencer was confounded by what she saw.

“I guess I expected to find the place primitive, crude and desperate,” she said. “Instead I came upon a culture that seems socially and architecturally far more graceful than anything we may find in Los Angeles.”

Spencer is one of 17 students from the UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning who collaborated on a project to design a cultural center for Patzcuaro. Working with 18 architecture students from Mexico City’s Universidad La Iberoamericana, known as La Ibero, the assignment was to design a center that would enhance the urban fabric and historic dignity of the Spanish Colonial town.

That was no small challenge in the eyes of La Ibero professor Jose Nava, who says the American students came to Patzcuaro “loaded with assumptions about the primitivism and picturesqueness of the place. Their view of our architecture is unreal, clouded by visions of pre-Columbian pyramids and Mayan ziggurats.”

But renowned architect Ricardo Legoretta of Mexico City, currently a visiting professor at UCLA and a guiding light and cultural bridge between the two groups, believes the program has more to do with people than with architecture.

“The interaction has been very personal,” he said. “There have been love affairs. There have been antagonisms and resentments. There have been revelations. Young minds have been cracked open in dramatic fashion.”

To present their designs and view those of their UCLA counterparts, the Mexican students arrived in Los Angeles on Sunday for a weeklong stay. Accompanying them are three faculty members, including La Ibero architecture dean Jorge Ballina. The UCLA group, led by professor Buzz Yudell, visited Patzcuaro for three days last February.

From Anita Mermel’s perspective as a UCLA assistant dean, the collaborative project has two main aims--”to open our students’ minds to a neighboring cultural environment they’ve likely undervalued. And to open their eyes to the rich Hispanic heritage that exists right under their noses in Southern California.” The student designs, she noted, will also be part of a preliminary study for a project to be funded by the Mexican government.

Center of Activity

Patzcuaro, a town of 20,000 about 200 miles west of Mexico City, is the center of regional handicrafts in the state of Michoacan. The villages surrounding Lake Patzcuaro produce a rich variety of crafts, including copperware, furniture, stoneware and musical instruments, especially guitars.

The challenge for the U.S. and Mexican architecture students was to design a cultural center for the display of these handicrafts and to incorporate 20 rooms for visitors and a family planning clinic.

And their visions differed radically.

UCLA’s James Simeo included a sliced, open-sided pyramid in his design, to “display the levels of Mexican culture over time.” Tony Loui’s scheme featured a hollow squared ziggurat that dominated the complex with its powerful, squat presence.

Gabe Gelbart, on the other hand, was more observant. “In Patzcuaro I learned the precise difference between a patio and a plaza,” he said. “A patio is an open space inside a building. A plaza is a public space created by the surrounding architecture.”

A Different Approach

The Mexican students were altogether less precious in their approach to Patzcuaro’s 18th-Century Spanish Colonial heritage.

Said Rogelio Gallegos, whose design was dominated by a vivid yellow Postmodern wall: “This is a living town, and we must make a vigorous link with the future, to prevent Patzcuaro from being degraded into a mere museum for tourists. That would be the ultimate cultural condescension.”

Some UCLA students think Patzcuaro is threatened by a kind of Disneyland artificiality and fear for its future.

“The town is culturally vulnerable to a degree,” West Germany’s Werner Lang said. “It could easily be destroyed, either by too much concern for its historic integrity or by too much crude modernist intervention.”

Three Key Issues

UCLA professor Yudell, part of the jury that reviewed the students’ models and drawings last Monday, summarized the three key issues involved in the design: “How much or little may we deviate from the town’s historic character? How can we preserve the residential scale of Iturbide Avenue where the center’s to be located? What is the symbolic role of the center in regard to Patzcuaro’s past and its future?”

The last question provoked the most disagreement. Students were asked: Should Patzcuaro’s Cultural Center look backward or forward--or both ways at once?

“Both ways,” said La Ibero student Jose Ramon Garcia, whose design featured a traditional enclosed Mexican plaza dominated by a high enclosing wall painted bright Postmodern blue.

In agreement was Yasuki Yuyama, a UCLA student from Japan. “People in the so-called advanced countries tend to want to pickle in aspic a mysterious culture like Patzcuaro,” he said. “I think this is a selfish attitude, as if the poorer peoples of the world have a duty to preserve a beauty we’ve destroyed.”

‘Intersection of Cultures’

Yuyama said his design, a mixture of historic and Postmodern motifs organized around a series of interlinked patios, represented “an intersection of cultures, past and present, historic and advanced, that enrich each other.”

Intellectual bridges were thrown across the cultural divide by UCLA students from Latin America.

“Mexico, like many ‘backward’ countries, has pockets of great sophistication that often surpass their economic superiors,” Brazilian Fernando Iglesias said. “Patzcuaro is such a place. It may be poor in economic terms, but it’s rich in architecture, beyond the dreams of most Angelenos. And it’s proud of its presence in a way the gringos have forgotten.”

Legoretta, in the process of designing an International Student Center at UCLA--expressed this conflict more diplomatically.

“Mexican and American architectural students have a lot to learn from one another,” he said. “Above all, in collaborations such as these, that we plan to continue, they learn that in today’s world all values are essentially international.

“Nobody has a monopoly on being modern. Nobody, and no culture, is more or less human than any other.”