USF/DF the book

USFDF

Tactics of appropriation Santa Fe Housing Unit

USFDF Tactics of appropriation

Onnis Luque

USFDF

TacTics of appropriaTion sanTa fe Housing uniT

© 2012 sponsored by Fonca-Conaculta © 2012 coedited by jovis Verlag GmbH Publication. © Texts by kind permission of the authors. © Pictures by Onnis Luque.

ISBN 978-3-939633-76-1 Concept: Onnis Luque.

English: Fionn Petch.

Pablo Landa Ruiloba Printing and binding: GCC Grafisches Centrum Cuno, Calbe.

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.ddb.de abrufbar. jovis Verlag GmbH Kurfürstenstraße 15/16 10785 Berlin www.jovis.de Este libro se realizó con apoyo del Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes a través del Programa Fomento a Proyectos y Coinversiones Culturales XXVII emisión 2011.

onnis Luque pHoTograpHY

TeXTs BY peter K r i eger c hr i s ti a n v on Wi s s el pa b l o La n da rui l ob a

1957

I N T R O D U C T I O N

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 hyper-agglomeration 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 art photography and investigative photojournalism, Luque’s images suggest the aesthetic potentials of the principles of bricolage as much as they reveal the ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ of place (Soja 2009). They invite us to both appreciate and challenge the everyday manifestations of how “the spatial shapes the social as much as the social shapes the spatial” (ibid 2009:3). The images compiled in this book connect and refract, evoke and unpack the creative tensions between everyday life and model living. They have the courage to complicate the story (cf. Mauad and Rouverol 2004), to ask questions rather then foreclose answers when taking us out into the open where the tactics of appropriation (re)negotiate the forms and functions of an iconic modernist housing development.

In the brief discussion accompanying Luque’s visual investigation, the anthropologist Pablo Landa takes on this shifting ground between agency and architecture, between lived and conceived space (Lefebvre 2009:33ff). He is joined by art historian Peter Krieger who points us to the modes and powers of perception and (visual) intervention by which the urban dweller makes this complex system a constituent part

of her/his identity. Both their writings engage critically with the people and places, positions and perspectives that look in on us through Luque’s camera now that we are looking at the pictures (cf. Back 2007:104). Being himself a resident of the Santa Fe housing estate, Onnis Luque is opening this window to let his neighbours, friends and relatives tell us their stories about such commonplace yet remarkable activities as ‘working things out’, ‘making ends meet’ and ‘getting around’. We learn about add-on spaces and pop-up times and are invited to follow ad-hoc routes that locals take to see what comes next (cf. Simone 2004). Following Luque through an array of additional staircases, extra floor levels, transformed balconies, floating awnings and outreaching porticos we can ‘listen with the eyes’ (Back 2007) to how space is put to work and expression carved out of action.

Hence, when seen in the context of urban studies, Luque’s photos and photographing practice constitute a rich visual method for social research. If we appreciate complexity, uncertainty and surprise as highly significant ingredients of urban life (Pieterse 2008:5), than Luque’s images acquire additional value precisely because they encourage multiple interpretations both during and after the research process (cf. Pink 2007). They trace the sedimentation of the many stories that constitute the city (cf. Simone 2004:11) and challenge us to draw connections between these intimate expressions and the (seemingly) remote historical and social transformations in which they are set (Mills 2000; Knowles and Sweetman 2004:8).

For example, the broad variety of aesthetic interventions to the modernist architecture resemble what could be coined a copy-past culture and the cult of ‘neo-’, materializing in ever-new Greek, baroque and early modernist citations by which the ‘building self’ inscribes her/himself into the post-modern canon that we dispose of for the construction of both our identity and our urban imaginaries. Likewise, the

collecting, sampling and curating of life itself appear before our eyes as soon as we are invited to step inside Luque’s own and his neighbours’ homes. Witnessing the force of stay in the roots of a tree exploding a bench or the power of persuasion of a young couple spending a day out in the sun, we sense how different agents and forces compete with each other in the transformation and persistence of the built environment.

Who is adapting to whom, we ask wandering from image to image: nature to planning or planning to nature; people to architecture or architecture to people; space to its use or usage to the space provided/claimed?

Everywhere we look, creative tensions arise between project and improvisation when the inhabitants of the unidad habitacional Santa Fe use their own lives and the spaces they live in as both resources and arena for their tactics of appropriation. Onnis Luque captures these tensions with sharp attention and skilful art. His images give testimony of the transformative and interpretative powers of those urban inventions grown by adaptation and resistance. As Peter Krieger frames it, they invite us to critically examine this as much as our own urban habitat with eyes open to ‘the other beauty’ of everyday inhabitability.

Bibliography Back, Les. 2007. The Art of Listening. English ed. Oxford; New York: Berg. de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. [French original: 1980]. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Knowles, Caroline, and Paul Sweetman, eds. 2004. Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual Methods and the Sociological Imagination. New York NY: Routledge.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2009. The Production of Space. [27. English edition, French original 1974].

Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell.

Mauad, Ana Maria, and Alicia J. Rouverol. 2004. ‘Telling the Story of Linda Lord through Photographs’. Pp. 178–192 in Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual Methods and the Sociological Imagination, edited by Caroline Knowles and Paul Sweetman. New York NY: Routledge.

Mills, C. Wright. 2000. The Sociological Imagination. [first ed. 1959]. Oxford [England];New York: Oxford University Press.

Pieterse, Edgar. 2008. City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development. London: Zed Book.

Pink, Sarah. 2007. Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media, and Representation in Research. 2nd ed. [first edition 2001]. London; Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. For the City yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities.

Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Soja, Edward. 2009. ‘The City and Spatial Justice’. Justice spatiale: Spatial Justice (online) 1(1). Retrieved May 24, 2011 (http://www.jssj.org/archives/01/05.php).

Modernity’s Metamorphosis Images of the Santa Fe Housing Unit in the Mexican Megalopolis

P eter K rieger Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM

Onnis Luque’s photographic narrative on the transformation of a wellknown modernist-functionalist housing unit in Mexico City, half a century after its construction, is not a neutral document, but a visual construction from a subjective perspective, where we can appreciate the aesthetic value of everyday life in an emblematic and paradigmatic habitat. This collection of images is not in itself a record of the metamorphosis of a housing estate, but rather something that lends itself to multiple readings—which vary depending on the interests and intellectual capabilities of its viewers—on the permanent reconfiguration of a defining urban-architectural pattern implemented in rapidly-growing Mexico City during the modernizing phase that took place in the 1950s. Despite the support for the understanding of this phenomenon in historical, anthropological and aesthetical reflections found in this and other texts in this volume, the selected images do not offer final answers on this phenomenon. Rather, they stimulate it: ¿how is it possible that a sharp, brilliant spatial-architectural structure, can become a visual ensemble of great complexity and profound contradictions? ¿What are the forces of socio-spatial reconfiguration whose results are captured by Luque in his revealing shots? Even amidst the flood of images that circulate on our screens and printed materials, these photographs break with a visual routine and elicit reflections; they help us reinvent the mutant visual construction—and thus the controversial spatial identifications—of life in Latin American megalopolis. It is worth mentioning that even for a Eurocentric or North American public, the reading of this visual discourse offers unexpected opportunities for introspection,

from which emerge truly “post” (and not “neo”-colonial) models that help understand the urban autopoeisis of the 21th century.

Onnis Luque, both an architect and a photographer, takes advantage of the license given by creative subjectivity to stimulate attention on the unpredictable interaction between urban elements and socio-cultural practices: he portrays perceived surroundings as the invention of another beauty that goes beyond what is planned. In order to understand to epistemological potential of the photographs presented in this book I consider, first, the integration of the artist to his context and the topos of his visual investigation. Second, I consider some conceptual aspects pertaining the contradictions that exist in the Santa Fe Housing Unit. Third, I reflect on the ways in which Luque’s visual narrative is configured.

Integration The presence of portraits of the Santa Fe Housing Unit’s inhabitants in the visual discourse signals the photographer’s deliberate approximation to his object of study. The images do not only show the original structures and their modifications, but also present the authors of their transformations. Shown in fixed poses, as if they were petrified or were monuments to their own professional and personal lives, the selected neighbors represent the succession of the three generations that live in the housing estate. Luque is part of this rooted social construction: his grandparents were part of the initial settlers, who were followed by his parents; he, too, chose to live in this place. For this reason, the portraits, some of

which were shot in private spaces—in living rooms crowded with furniture and kitsch objects, or in stores filled to the top with junk food—are not characterized by the social obscenity of classist cynicism of many photographers with similar projects; rather, they reveal that behind the insecure gaze of those represented, there is pride in living where they do.

Further, Onnis Luque witnessed the drastic changes that came with the privatization of the housing estate, which took place in 1982, when the Mexican Social Security Institute abandoned its earlier urban-social commitment and transferred ownership of the complex to individuals and an administrative trust. This was a watershed that led to the anarchic reconfiguration of the housing unit. Before this, the complex had already experienced some transformations. Large families did not fit in the tight apartments, and there were attempts at extending and changing the functions of assigned spaces. However, during the early period the state’s order prevailed, and at least in part, the large common spaces and green areas compensated for the overcrowded interiors. This order collapsed with privatization, when many neighbors illegally occupied and walled public spaces. At this moment, individual architectural expression blossomed: families built new stories over the original houses, they built neo-classical porticoes, balustrades and other kitsch ornaments, they placed shiny aluminum doors and barbed wire, pained their property in bright colors, improvised new roofs and expanded balconies, among other actions to reclaim more property for their own and change the habitat’s aesthetic patterns.

This “referendum” against rigorous and pure modern architecture, which Luque observed over the past decades, is the main theme of his photographic series on the Santa Fe Housing Unit. His training as an architect (at the UNAM) offered him valuable insights on the aesthetic education of the masses through images of neo-historical interiors in soap operas, and on the supply of ornament in the construction market. The metamorphosis of an austere modern house into an opulent chalet reveals how the production of architectural needs takes place well beyond the aesthetic will of architects. What Luque documents is the autonomy and anarchy of the architectural habitus, without emitting value judgments and with high-quality photography.

No doubt, beyond aesthetic issues, structural and territorial issues are worrying: the housing unit’s living space was doubled, large parts of its public gardens disappeared, cars invaded sidewalks massively (some of them actually function as automobile cemeteries), and graffiti proliferated (grafitti is no doubt an interesting indicator of crisis in deteriorated spaces in megalopolis). These changes are layers and sediments of a new stage in the history of the Santa Fe Housing Unit, which not only put into question the purity of modern architecture, but also generate a different notion of “home,” that is, of the symbolic relation with a place. For Luque and his generation, this absurd collage of architectural-ornamental elements is normality; it is the visual standard of large parts of the Mexican megalopolis.

These images nourish the self-understanding of a young “chilango” generation that celebrates the cultural and environmental decomposition of

its habitat as an aesthetic game with no fixed rules. The patchwork that emerges, when, for example, the owner of an apartment decides to paint the part of a building’s façade that corresponds to his property, is not seen as a sign of the erosion of the communitarian spirit, but rather as a playful event, omnipresent in Mexico City’s urban image. This attitude is probably seen as a form of liberation in face of an authoritarian state and its architectural imprint, designed and implemented during the nineteenfifties by one of the most notable architects of the political establishment: Mario Pani, author of Santa Fe. In this way, the inhabitants of this island of modernist happiness renegotiated the rules of aesthetic and ethical respect. As a witness and actor, Luque records these changes with his camera.

Conceptualization However, not many people today perceive and understand this metamorphosis of urban image. Even when the megalopolis’ “chaos” becoame one of the favorite topics of neo-conceptual Mexican art at the dawn of the 21th century, and functionalist housing units—in their current degenerated state—served as the symbolic sets new cinema in the country since the nineteen-nineties, there has not been a deeper reflection on the aesthetic status of the urban object. The visual sensibility of the average inhabitant of the megacity is similar to the capacity of the lizard that operates in a close sensorial system. From this emerges one of the didactic stimuli in Luque’s photography: in his work he reveals the ironic

tensions of a place and converts them into an aesthetic project capable of disrupting visual and intellectual routines that characterize everyday dealings with the city. From the observation and photographic conceptualization of a paradigmatic urban environment a symbolic world emerges—and the photographs do not necessarily make this universe more comprehensible; rather, they heighten, in the mind of attentive observers, its complexity. Thus, the (self-) built banality of the housing estate appears enigmatic. Within the frame of printed photos, the traces and codes of constructive anarchy, superimposed on the Santa Fe Housing Unit, configure the key visual topics of hyper-urban culture in the early 21th century.

The central topic explored by the photographer-architect through the subtle documentation of this housing estate is the systematic clash between modern architecture’s scenography and the various decorative elements that reproduce like visual parasites all over the Santa Fe Unit.

The original Bauhaus-style balconies right next with neo-baroque balustrades, or as it happens in one case, next to one that has been used as a base for a protrusion with a gabled roof, represent not only is a culturalarchitectonic contradiction, but also the advent of a new order of things: these structural ruptures and visual clashes question the one-dimensional “meaning” of modern architecture, and, through the self-organization of alternative models—as banal of “ugly” as they might be—increase the complexity of the entire system. The iteration of the ballustrades dissolves the serial pattern of the original architectural design. It is a playful

way to generate new systems of meaning, which alter regularity and chaos. Even though the formal apparatus of this anarchy is limited (due to supply within the construction market and the technical abilities and cultural imagination of self-builders), this is a cultural process that interacts with its given environment and produces unexpected results.

Luque documents these clashes with a certain critical distance. What represents a nightmare for the defenders of modern architecture becomes an aesthetic event, where shapes and colors interact on the basis of a collage visual principle. In the words of art historian Herbert Molderings, “the decomposition of an object’s identity in whichever number of aspects or facets, and its montage for the construction of a new ideal whole,” a principle explored by avant-garde art at the beginning of the 20th century, produces an unexpected aesthetic almost a century later.

Proposition Further, Onnis Luque’s gaze is a counter-proposal to the sublime synergy of modern architecture and photography, as practiced by Armando Salas Portugal and Guillermo Zamora in the mid-20th century for the benefit and promotion of new styles of urban living in functionalist housing units. Luque’s work offers a different form of perception that goes beyond the aseptic representation of the modern habitat, in which the final result coincides with abstract clarity with the project’s model (visible in the aerial photograph reproduced in this book, shot in 1957, the year of Santa Fe’s inauguration). In contrast to these period images, Luque

captures the complex signatures of the current reality in megalopolis, in Mexico and beyond. Visual topic such as the integration of decorous and fake neo-baroque elements, or the clash of natural elements such as a tree’s roots (half a century old) with reinforced concrete structures, produce a visual shock with epistemological potential. However, Luque’s is not a catastrophic vision, as was described by Camilo José Vergara in his record of the decline of many American cities, in particular modernist housing complexes. Rather, his portraits of Mexico’s Santa Fe Housing Unit evince alternative forms of constructive “progress”—forms that emerge from the interaction of people with the authoritarian fabrications of large construction companies, and which have led to the decomposition of a rigid architectural imprint.

In this sense, Luque’s images are polaroid shots of a process of urban morphology, and as such, they constitute an archive of the sociospatial conditions of a distinguished island in the middle of the autopoietic hyper-urbanization referred to as the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico. This archive converts objects in images that remain while architectural mutations persist. Its images correspond to a socio-cultural stage with its own parameters for the creation of urban-spatial identities.

The alternative tectonics and texture of the Santa Fe Housing Unit at the turn of the 21th century is still different from its surroundings, self-built from scratch, where the chaos holds full sway (as another form of order).

The walled housing estate, with a single access, is still marked with the IMSS’ logo, which stands out in the collage stage set as an outstanding

socio-cultural model. Its morphology, a hybrid of the original substance and its self-built mutations, finds, in Luque’s photographs, a good complement, through which the attentive reader or neighbor can augment his or her visual sensibility towards the environmental and socio-cultural conditions of the megalopolis—the images open a window towards this important and ever-enigmatic reality.

Influences and Ideas that Shaped the Santa Fe Housing Unit P ablo L anda R uiloba

The blueprints of the Santa Fe social services and housing unit preserved in the complex’s archive suggest that its design and construction were long processes. The oldest, dated 1953, correspond to the clusters of single-family houses. The plans of apartment slabs are from 1954, and those of the social and sports center known as the Casino are from 1956. In all of them, Mario Pani features as the main architect, but in each stage he had different associates, including Salvador Ortega, Domingo García Ramos, Luis Ramos Cunningham and Victor Vila.

Mario Pani once said that he drew the plans of the Miguel Aleman housing unit (1949) in three weeks. And it shows: the complex is assertive and single-minded, with a zigzagging fourteen-story building that extends from one end of the plot to the other. The Miguel Alemán was a pioneering work that sought to demonstrate the feasibility and desirability of building social housing in high-rise buildings. Santa Fe, on the other hand, corresponds to a more reflective moment in Pani’s career—it is a carefully assembled collage where a wide range of influences and previous experiences converge. The three years that spanned from the beginning of its design to its completion were spent in conversations among architects and government functionaries towards the definition and refinement of the ideas that gave shape to the housing unit.

Antonio Ortiz Mena was director of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) from 1952 to 1958—the Santa Fe complex was an expression of his vision for the country’s future, which he continued pursuing as minister of finance, from 1958 to 1970. While the government had built a number of

housing complexes in previous years, Santa Fe was different. Earlier developments were mostly mortgaged to bureaucrats; Santa Fe’s 2,200 houses and apartments remained public property and were rented to workers affiliated to the IMSS from a wide range of private and public companies.

The fact that houses and apartments were rentals represented both a critique of private property and something that would allow people to live in appropriate dwellings at different stages of their life—the smaller houses and apartments would be assigned to single men and women, or to young couples, who would move to the larger houses once they had children and return to a small ones in their old age. Moreover, people would be able to move to other complexes to be close to their workplaces—Santa Fe was conceived as a model that would be reproduced all over the country. In all housing units, there would be a health clinic, schools, and other spaces for cultural, educational and recreational activities.

While this vision was only partly realized—the IMSS built only eleven more complexes, houses and apartments in them were assigned without much consideration to family types, and people rarely moved—it helps interpret the symbolic dimension of Santa Fe as an attempt at bringing about a new stage in the country’s history founded on social security, where workers would have access to a wide range of services and therefore be healthy, productive and the proud members of the Mexican nation.

Formally, housing complexes built before Santa Fe were composed of either freely arranged apartment slabs—as in the case of the Miguel Alemán and Juárez (1952) complexes—or dense groups of houses—as

in the case of the Modelo (1952) and Balbuena (1952) complexes. In Santa Fe, a combination of multi-family buildings and single-family houses were arranged, as onion layers, around a distinct center. Four story buildings, variations of two of building types in the Juárez complex, mark the housing unit’s outer perimeter, and encircle its only street—a one-way circuit that in its turn surrounds house clusters. Pedestrian walkways communicate this street to a sloped garden, which on its eastern end culminates in Santa Fe’s central plaza.

The plaza is surrounded by an expressive brick and concrete building with one hundred apartments and a series of public institutions: a theater, a health clinic, commercial spaces, some of which eventually became one of the many female right-holder’s cultural clubs sponsored by the IMSS in different “popular neighborhoods.” The plaza also has a kiosk—a concrete shell designed by Félix Candela—and a monument consisting of a sculptural flagpole and a mosaic mural by Jorge González Camarena with the names, in bronze letters, of some of the most prominent heroes in Mexico’s official history.

While there sports and commercial spaces and public buildings in other parts of the complex, including two elementary schools, two kindergartens and a day care center, the Heroes’ Plaza, as it is known in its blueprints and by Santa Fe’s inhabitants today, is the complex’s unequivocal center. This space it is both a site where neighbors gather regularly to socialize and where events such as assemblies and campaign rallies take and have taken place for the past half a century.

Santa Fe’s plaza is congruent with the growing centralism of Mexican politics at the time. As such, it brings together a number of symbolic elements that would contribute to cement the state’s power and inculcate a vision of the country’s past and present in the complex’s neighbors—it was in fact an attempt at giving workers, many of whom formerly lived in marginal areas, a place at the center of the Mexican nation. In 1957, when Santa Fe was inaugurated, hundreds gathered in its plaza to hear Ortiz Mena describe the complex as the culmination of Mexico’s history.

Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, the country’s president, was present in this event, and so were major union leaders and public officials, including Adolfo López Mateos, who was elected president in 1958.

Ortiz Mena traced a long process of liberation that had begun a century before—in 1857, when a liberal constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech, conscience, religion, and assembly had been ratified. Appropriately, this date appears under Juárez name in Santa Fe’s plaza. The complex was also a strategy whereby the state sought to fulfill “the promises of the Mexican Revolution,” which were articulated in a new constitution when the conflict ended. This document included the right to housing, health and leisure. The year it was ratified, 1917, is memorialized under president Carranza’s name in the Heroes’ Plaza.

Contiguous to the heroes’ names is a plaque that commemorates Santa Fe’s inauguration. It includes the name and a poetic quote by president Ruiz Cortines —he was clearly fashioned as another hero. An almighty and benevolent leader, he stood at the center of the state—his govern-

ment had the power and the will to fulfill long-postponed promises and thus, in Ortiz Mena’s words “create… generations of young people who will live without social resentments, who will mold their character in gentleness towards their own kind, love for nature, and respect for our institutions.” Ortiz Mena and Pani knew that carefully articulated central plazas, with plaques and monuments, are good places for the construction and affirmation of such myths.

The Heroes’ Plaza follows the model of those in Mexican colonial towns.

The Laws of the Indies stipulated that streets in new settlements should be laid out in a regular grid, and that one block at its center should be left empty and surrounded by public buildings and symbols of power, which always included a Catholic church and the city council. Given the secularity of the Mexican state at the time, there is no church in Santa Fe, but its many institutions represent a concerted effort at not only offering state services, but at inscribing them within a national history—a “sacred atlas of time” that is not unlike those associated with religion.

The colonial model was both conducive to the state’s interests and close to Pani’s concerns at the time. Early on in his career, in the second number of Arquitecura, a magazine he directed, he published a “colonial house” in Northern Africa by Italian architect Luigi Piccinato. The text that accompanies plans and photos describes it as an “interesting modern solution to the classical parti of the freestanding Mediterranean house,” where the architect borrowed from “tradition nothing more than the essential, the founding idea… which he skillfully adapted to the needs

and conditions of our time” with no ornament and with modern detailing and materials.

Pani’s projects at the time were much unlike the ideal he identified in Piccinato’s house. His architecture, however, matured quickly. In the forties, he designed Mexico’s National Teachers’ College, as well as unbuilt projects for a national library and a sports club for Mexico City’s Spanish community. These large-scale complexes are organized around axis that cut through iconic high-rise buildings and enclosed spaces, around which other, less prominent buildings are organized. This spatial organization would reemerge in Pani and Enrique del Moral’s master plan for the University City of Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM; 1952), and be developed further and adapted to a different typology in the Santa Fe complex. In these projects, Pani progressively stepped away from the classical tradition and formulated a Mexican architecture that is congruent with the ideal he discerned in Piccinato’s house.

In the University City, Pani and Del Moral realized a modern solution for a ceremonial complex that is, spatially, much more like pre-Hispanic and colonial buildings and cities than it is like large-scale projects by Le Corbusier and other modernists. Here, buildings are distinct pieces assembled around a central space, with no circulations for cars. This space evokes those of colonial haciendas and convents, with their porticoes around enclosed patios and gardens. The scale of the complex and the organization of its buildings along a symbolic axis that runs through the stadium—fashioned as a sacred mountain—and rectory—a high-rise

that presides over the campus’ central space—is similar to Mesoamerican cities such as Teotihuacan and Monte Albán.

Moreover, the University City adapts to and celebrates the terrain on which it was built by mimicking some of its characteristics. The pathways that serpent through the volcanic rocks of the Pedregal are reproduced in the UNAM’s stone walls, staircases and slopes, and in the corridors between buildings that open up to other buildings and patios.

Pani brought to bear the experience of designing the UNAM when he built Santa Fe. In the housing complex there are stone walls that form passages, abrupt changes in the land’s level that produce expressive corridors and public spaces, and sequences that make journeys through the complex dramatic; buildings conceal what lies behind them and thus invite visitors to walk through or around them, on to other spaces. All of Santa Fe’s spatial sequences eventually culminate in the Heroes’ Plaza—a more concentrated center than that of the University City, but much like it as the core of a complex derived from an established typology; in this case, the Spanish colonial town.

Some of Santa Fe’s most notable public spaces are the gardens within its house clusters. Houses are arranged in rows, and served by straight pedestrian walkways that communicate the complex’s street to its central garden. Every certain number of houses, there is a clearing—intimate gardens that occupy the area equivalent to four houses. The experience of entering these gardens is similar to the experience of entering smaller public spaces adjacent to the central esplanade in the University City. Their ori-

gins, however, can be traced to other sources explored and tested by Pani in earlier works.

José Luis Cuevas was an architect and urban planner who studied in England in the first years of the twentieth century. In his design for the Hipódromo (19xx) and Lomas de Chapultepec (19xx) neighborhoods he introduced the model of the garden city to Mexico. Simultaneously to his work for private developers, he did major projects for the government—among them is Zacatepec (1937), a town built around a sugar mill in the state of Morelos, commissioned by president Lázaro Cárdenas. In this context, he designed housing for the mill’s workers that recalls both nineteenth-century British industrial cities and vecindades where many working class Mexicans lived—large houses subdivided into one-room apartments, with internal patios.

José Luis Cuevas was Pani’s associate in a number of projects. They established an urban planning workshop in 1948, and collaborated in the design of industrial compounds, agricultural towns and new neighborhoods. One of these neighborhoods is the Modelo housing unit, where some of Zacatepec’s features reemerge. Here, too, houses are not freestanding structures surrounded by open areas like those of garden cities, but contiguous and served by walkways. By privileging pedestrian circulations over streets for cars, the architects were likely moved by economical considerations—the new houses had to be as economical as possible, and corridors used less land than streets. Moreover, they thought perhaps that people should move to spaces similar to those they

knew—the Modelo complex was an improved vecindad, with larger living quarters, and better ventilation, sanitation and access to gardens and public spaces.

While Cuevas was not directly involved in the design of Santa Fe, Pani evidently used the model he first developed in Zacatepec as a point of departure. The housing clusters are in fact almost identical to some of the blocks in Zacatepec. What is different is that whereas in this city houses follow varying arrangements, in Santa Fe, Pani converted one of them into a standard module that he confidently reproduced it more than a hundred times, bringing it together with other tested modules—the buildings in the Juárez complex—into a coherent whole organized around a center.

Pani, who was an avid reader of international architecture publications, was no doubt also subject to direct foreign influences. Enrique de Anda, for example, has suggested that Santa Fe responds to conclusions of the 1951 CIAM on “The Heart of the City.” Other possible sources include Josep Lluís Sert’s insistence in the 1949 CIAM on the importance of designing “civic centers” and his calling to go beyond “functionalism” in architecture and attempt to “satisfy the human sprit” —the symbolic content of Santa Fe might be a response to this suggestion.

However, histories of architecture that privilege center-periphery narratives obscure the complex processes that take place within presumed peripheries. Santa Fe is not, after all, simply a modern complex, but a modern complex of a particular kind. As in the case of Piccinato’s colo-

nial house, the housing unit’s architecture is modern—with reinforced concrete structures, industrial brick and glass façades, and functional floor plans. Yet it is also distinctly Mexican to the extent that its design arose from a long process of formulation of social security policies, and from the adaptation of models and typologies with both local and foreign origins into a complex conducive to the implementation of these policies.

As is evident when comparing Guillermo Zamora to Onnis Luque’s photographs, much has changed in Santa Fe since the time of its inauguration more than half a century ago. Rents remained low, and with inflation, this and other complexes became economically unsustainable. The IMSS, burdened by mismanagement and the obligation to pay retirement pensions to millions, concentrated its efforts on that and on the provision of health care—it abandoned the broad definition of social security as an instrument of nation-building and social engineering that it had advanced through the construction of social services and housing units.

The process whereby Santa Fe was privatized and converted into a condominium began in 1984. Its houses and apartments were sold to their occupants for discounted fees and the IMSS abandoned many of the responsibilities it had earlier assumed. Social workers, gardeners, maintenance staff and other government employees ceased to be seen in Santa Fe. New homeowners began modifying their living environment, something that was forbidden at the time of the IMSS: many built new stories over their houses, added decorative elements to façades, and

walled off common areas. Santa Fe’s house clusters, as seen in Luque’s photos, are practically unrecognizable, and buildings have various appendages and modifications.

Today, many in Santa Fe describe the first thirty years of the complex as a paradise. IMSS employees promptly attended to their every need, and disputes among neighbors were settled by authority figures recognized by all. The services offered in the complex helped thousands to advance socially and economically—they moved swiftly from the working to the middle class, and became one of its most solid sectors.

On the other hand, today some public areas in the complex look abandoned, walls are covered in graffiti, chains and gates interrupt streets to reserve parking spaces, and the legitimacy of the local administration is questioned constantly. If Santa Fe was once imagined as a foreshadowing of Mexico’s future, today it is an eccentric social and architectural experiment from a long-gone era.

By pointing this out, neighbors express their support for project as it was initiated in the nineteen-fifties, and condemn the transformations undergone by the Mexican state in its shift towards neoliberalism. The ideals that were formulated through the creation of Santa Fe appear to have been lost—people in the complex are not necessarily “gentle towards their own kind” nor have respect for institutions. The present is not, however, as bad as neighbors suggest, nor is the complex as radically different from what it once was. While the people of Santa Fe are no longer the privileged subjects of the Mexican state they once were, property

ownership gave them financial security and thus greater opportunities to express their opinions and participate in the country’s public life as autonomous agents.

Moreover, the modifications undergone by the complex reveal the lasting success of Pani and Ortiz Mena’s project. Once Santa Fe was privatized, its inhabitants easily appropriated the complex—the structure of houses welcomed additions and modifications and, even without the orchestration of the state, gardens within clusters and the central plaza remained spaces where people interact and come together as a community. Notably, the Heroes’ Plaza is still the symbolic center of the complex, and the historical narrative embodied in its monument remains current—it seems that people in Santa Fe are in fact members of the Mexican nation as Ortiz Mena and his collaborators once imagined it.

When the Zapatista uprising began in the Mexican state of Chiapas, a group of young men from the housing unit carved the name “Marcos” to the side of the bronze names of other heroes. The mid-nineties were a period of political unrest. The country was struggling to adapt to abrupt changes such as the privatization of Santa Fe, and many were dissatisfied with the PRI, which seemed undefeatable through political means.

The Zapatista movement offered a source of hope—as its figurehead, Marcos had made an opening in the political system, and thus helped people envision alternatives. One of the men who wrote Marcos on the wall told me recently this is why he and his friends, in a moment of elation, decided that he deserved a place in Mexico’s history, and therefore

on Santa Fe’s wall. I asked him if it would not have made more sense to put this history to the side instead of adding new heroes to it. Perhaps a more reasonable act of rebellion would have been to take down the bronze names on the wall—but they remain intact.