Page 107 - Libro Max Cetto

Preface

Bettina Cetto

Mexican architecture can be good only when it harmonizes with its environment,
and it will be Mexican of its own accord when it is good.

Max Cetto 1

he freely accessible web publication of this classic of Mexican architecture has been made
Tpossible by the Mexican Culture Secretariat’s Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyec-
tos Culturales, in conjunction with the Laboratorio Editorial de Arquitectura (Lea) at the
2
Unam’s School of Architecture. Both echoed and gave an invaluable impetus to a long-
planned project, which consists not only of the just act of putting Cetto’s book back in circula-
3
tion, but that its publisher be precisely the Unam, where the architect was an active professor
and where one of the workshops at the School of Architecture bears his name: the Max Cetto
Workshop.
From the outset, the idea was to accompany this facsimile edition of Modern Architec-
ture in Mexico/Arquitectura moderna en México with a dossier of data and texts by connois-
seurs of Cetto’s work: views, analyses and reflections from the field of architecture itself. My
text is more anecdotal, primarily giving me the opportunity to render several testimonies.
Two of the essays introducing this publication set out to analyze the importance of
the book itself in the historiography of Mexican architecture and its author as the leading
protagonist of this story. The invitation to analyze Cettoʼs work, and this book in particular
60 years after its appearance, was enthusiastically received by these authors, who were asked
to write on specific topics, such as Cetto’s role as a professor and his educational and profes-
sional experience as a young architect in his native Germany, so that this publication has as
much and as varied information as possible.
The book opens with an essay by Juan Manuel Heredia, probably the person who has,
to date, carried out the most thorough research into Cetto’s work. His doctoral thesis at
the University of Pennsylvania, titled The Work of Max Cetto: Restorations of Topography and
Disciplinarity in Twentieth Century Modern Architecture, has unfortunately not yet been pub-
lished as a book. The essay he has contributed could be regarded as a section Heredia had
left pending to conclude his thesis, in which he claims Cetto’s rightful place as an architec-
tural theorist.
Cristina López Uribe and Salvador Lizárraga, specialists in the history of modern
Mexican architecture, active academics at the Unam’s School of Architecture and members
of the Lea, spent long days delving into my personal Cetto archive. They studied materials
that no one had analyzed before to present us with their insights into the history of Modern
Architecture in Mexico, how the book is situated in the context of national and international
publications and reflections on its form and content.

1 Max Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico/Arquitectura moderna en México (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc.,
1961), 29.
2 Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
3 Once approved by the Editorial Committee and the reviewers of the texts included in the dossier, this project still had
to undergo a long road to come to fruition. My greatest thanks to Juan Ignacio del Cueto Ruiz-Funes and Xavier Guzmán
Urbiola, Dean and Editorial Coordinator, respectively, of the School of Architecture.

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