Architecture: What’s Going Up in Mexico

Little is known in this country about contemporary Mexican architecture. Apart from monographs on Luis Barragan, who died in 1988, Ricardo Legorreta, who recently rebuilt Pershing Square, and Abraham Zabludovsky, there are almost no books on the subject. An exhibition through Sunday at Cal State Fullerton apparently is only the third in the United States to look at what Mexican architects are doing south of the border.

Why is this, and is the deficiency Mexico’s or our own? In a country where building has had to keep pace with a 73% increase in population in the past 20 years, there isn’t a shortage of new projects in Mexico to write about. The absence of information suggests a lack of excellence, or that we are shamefully ignorant of it.

That’s the starting point for “Myth and Modernism in Mexican Architecture,” curated by graduate students Karen Collins and Pollyanna Nordstrand. It looks at 10 of Mexico’s leading architects and tries to explain something of their thinking; through it we can learn why North and Central America fail to engage.

Mexico shares the dilemma of every foreign country in the 20th Century: how to handle the fact that it’s not the United States. In architecture, this has led to a duality. Some architects want to be part of global currents; others want to say something specifically Mexican. Between the two positions, there is confusion.

Zabludovsky, for example, creates scaleless abstract works with huge concrete slabs and powerful diagonals. His aesthetic and the way he talks about it belong to mainstream U.S. commercial architecture of the 1970s. Some, however, see in it a fundamental Mexican heaviness that echoes the work of Le Corbusier (for whom his former partner, Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon, once worked) but that finds a niche in the land of the Aztec pyramid.

Agustin Hernandez, by contrast, is a passionate advocate of pre-Hispanic art. He often uses Indian motifs as a starting point for his designs and believes in the search for national identity. But this is not apparent from his work. His daring, futuristic buildings could be settings for sci-fi movies.

The exhibition is intrigued by this ambivalence. The curators, who are not architects, are sympathetic to the idea of an authentic Mexican architecture--the “Myth” of the exhibition’s title--and have gone looking for it among Mexico’s most worldly and sophisticated architects. Their conclusion is that it doesn’t exist.

What does exist is a large body of conventional, modern buildings by a relatively elderly architectural establishment. The two younger architects in the show, Enrique Norten and Alberto Kalach, have more stylistic pizazz but also relate more to international trends than to national influences. Their stage is New York, Barcelona and Milan, not Mexico City.

Collins and Nordstrand elaborate on this. Mexico’s adoption of modern architecture in the 1920s, they observe, was linked to the social reforms that followed the 1910 Revolution. The idea was that architects would build a modern society by building a modern architecture. Few now believe this, yet Mexico’s architects remain loyal to the modernist aesthetic.

An accompanying essay by Mexican architectural critic Louise Noelle explains this loyalty in terms of the work it has produced. Noelle sees three post-’60s tendencies--Brutalism, Futurism and Cubism by any other name--contributing to a rich mix of Mexican architecture. Twenty years ago, that would have been something to boast about.

An American looking at the exhibit might complain that Mexican architecture is dragging its feet. That’s partly because we have grown used to exhibitions and publications that only deal with innovation. Historian Shelly Kappe, who curated the first show of Mexican architecture (in 1981), says all serious architects, not just those in Mexico, have been suppressed in the past 15 years in favor of the merely fashionable. The show at Fullerton is in fact very like hers.

But Collins and Nordstrand have underplayed the latest trends in Mexican architecture. An exhibition that focused on the next generation would have made Mexico look more exciting, or at least more competitive. The studios called TAX (Taller de Arquitectura X) and TEN (Taller de Enrique Norten), only touched on in Fullerton, do well alongside the chic historicists and deconstructivists of Europe and America.

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In neglecting them, the curators may have been ill-advised by the established figures whom they visited in Mexico City in June, but this itself is revealing. For 65 years, Mexico has been run by the same political party, giving rise to old-boy networks and inevitable stagnation. The absence of new faces from this exhibition bears out the perceived conservatism of Mexican architecture.

There are different ways of viewing this. While Kappe welcomes the survival of Mexico’s long-term players, USC professor John Mutlow, now writing a book on the New Architecture of Mexico for Rizzoli, sees it as partly retrograde. His book excludes two older exhibitors in the Fullerton show, Alejandro Zohn and Enrique Murillo, for not deserving the national honors they have won.

He further points to rote teaching at Mexico’s overpopulated architecture schools and the conformity that this produces among students. He cites the lack of advanced materials and building techniques found abroad.

Mexican architecture is still pre-industrial, he says. Agustin Landa and Carlos Mijares use brick vaulting where U.S. architects would roof in steel. Norten’s perforated metal sheeting has to be perforated by hand. Armies of laborers use chisels instead of jackhammers to provide Zabludovsky with his trademark rough concrete surfaces. Even the modernism of Mexico is imitative.

America does not look to Mexico for new architecture--perhaps because, as Mexico’s Nobel Prize-winning writer and critic Octavio Paz has suggested, America doesn’t think it can learn from a country that didn’t see the point of the New World. Mexico is equally conflicted. Many countries regard the concept of “progress” as interchangeable with “Americanization.” For Mexico in particular, this makes it a mixed blessing.

Collins and Nordstrand miss out on one other area of architectural interest. “I hate to say this,” says Norberto Nardi, an Italian-Argentinian architect whose course in Latin American architecture at Cal Poly Pomona is the only one of its kind in the U.S., “but developers appear to be the best interpreters of public taste. They’ve realized that the Mediterranean style is very popular.”

Architects may not take this seriously, but the public does. And that, after all, has been the story of architecture in the past 15 years.

Mexican architecture also has dramatic appeal, notes Nardi, whose book “Bridging the New World” will be appearing next year. “Mexican architecture is in many ways still about Spanish and pre-Columbian grandeur,” he says. “It’s big; it uses expensive natural materials and has spectacular finishes.”

What makes Mexico’s achievements possible, Nardi writes, are its low labor costs, the extraordinarily skillful artisans and the lax (and sometimes corrupt) building codes, which also enhance its sculptural possibilities. Barragan’s famous cantilevered staircase without a handrail never would have been allowed in the U.S., says Nardi, adding: “Public safety can be asphyxiating.”

The show at Fullerton was meant primarily as a student exercise in exhibition design. It deserves credit for this and for surviving the headaches of shipping. Its very success, however, gives it a public voice. This is significant. As exhibition design grows into an independent profession, its purpose becomes cloudier. However neutral it may try to be, an exhibition always offers a point of view. It is important that curators work with people who really know their field and understand the impact of what they include or omit.

* “Myths and Modernism in Mexican Architecture” continues through Dec. 11 at the Main Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Noon to 4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday; 3 to 7 p.m. Wednesday; 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday. $3. (714) 773-3262.