USF/DF Tactics of Appropriation: Santa Fe Housing Unit in Mexico City

USF/DF Tactics of appropriation: Santa Fe Housing Unit in Mexico city Onnis Luque

Introduction

In 1958 construction was concluded in the Santa Fe housing estate and state workers and their families were moving in into what was perceived as the flagship development of the national housing programme under the auspices of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS). The previous years, the site next to the historic Camino Real to Santa Fe had seen its transformation from an overgrown hillside location into a brand new neighbourhood of a city embracing the promises of modernisation and set on the path of massive expansion. Under the hands of Le Corbusier disciple Mario Pani, a leading architect and urban planner of his time in Mexico, the unidad habitacional Santa Fe was conceived as a model city for contented urban living. 60 years on, this vision can be said to have come true, even though the places and spatial organisation of life inside and around the estate have profoundly been transformed.

Built as the city’s pioneering toehold beyond the limits of the then urban fabric, today the Santa Fe housing estate appears as an island of contained serenity and persisting order within the ever-changing sea of this hyperagglomeration which we refer to as Mexico city. Yet this is only one side of the estates ‘reality’. The other is that of a built and inhabited collage of individual desires and worries, a socio-material artwork constantly shaped and reshaped by the practices of everyday life with their inherent possibilities of (re)appropriation and (re)combination (de Certeau 1988). Houses are constantly being adapted to changing needs and public space is subject to the continuous negotiation of often contrary claims regarding their ownership and best usage. Under the hands of the inhabitants – either in resistance or as expansion to what the hands of the architect had moulded – the estate’s relative solidity when seen in the broader urban context gives way to the micro-process of change. In this sense, the unidad habitacional Santa Fe is a model city for urban living too – the ideal place to study the poetic, the world-making ways of navigating the everyday by which lived-in, material space is socially produced (ibid 1988; Lefebvre 2009).

This making and remaking of place, set against the backdrop of Mexico city’s as well as of genuine urban processes and phenomena, is the essence captured in Onnis Luque’s USF-DF. Combining the virtues of both

Introduction

In 1958 construction was concluded in the Santa Fe housing estate and state workers and their families were moving in into what was perceived as the flagship development of the national housing programme under the auspices of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS). The previous years, the site next to the historic Camino Real to Santa Fe had seen its transformation from an overgrown hillside location into a brand new neighbourhood of a city embracing the promises of modernisation and set on the path of massive expansion. Under the hands of Le Corbusier disciple Mario Pani, a leading architect and urban planner of his time in Mexico, the unidad habitacional Santa Fe was conceived as a model city for contented urban living. 60 years on, this vision can be said to have come true, even though the places and spatial organisation of life inside and around the estate have profoundly been transformed.

Built as the city’s pioneering toehold beyond the limits of the then urban fabric, today the Santa Fe housing estate appears as an island of contained serenity and persisting order within the ever-changing sea of this hyperagglomeration which we refer to as Mexico city. Yet this is only one side of the estates ‘reality’. The other is that of a built and inhabited collage of individual desires and worries, a socio-material artwork constantly shaped and reshaped by the practices of everyday life with their inherent possibilities of (re)appropriation and (re)combination (de Certeau 1988). Houses are constantly being adapted to changing needs and public space is subject to the continuous negotiation of often contrary claims regarding their ownership and best usage. Under the hands of the inhabitants – either in resistance or as expansion to what the hands of the architect had moulded – the estate’s relative solidity when seen in the broader urban context gives way to the micro-process of change. In this sense, the unidad habitacional Santa Fe is a model city for urban living too – the ideal place to study the poetic, the world-making ways of navigating the everyday by which lived-in, material space is socially produced (ibid 1988; Lefebvre 2009).

This making and remaking of place, set against the backdrop of Mexico city’s as well as of genuine urban processes and phenomena, is the essence captured in Onnis Luque’s USF-DF. Combining the virtues of both

1957

www.usf-df.com www.onnisluque.com

MXDF 2012