Page 115 - Libro Max Cetto

Juan Manuel Heredia

Cetto and Theory: Echoes of Vitruvius and Alberti

It might seem strange to catalog Cetto as an architectural theorist. In the historiography of
twentieth century Mexican architecture, that position undoubtedly belongs, and almost ex-
7
clusively, to José Villagrán García, with honorable mentions for Carlos Obregón Santacilia,
Juan O’Gorman, Alberto T. Arai and Mauricio Gómez Mayorga. The theories of these fig-
ures, if any, largely consisted of diatribes, debates or, at best, technical or philosophical spec-
8
ulations that had little to do with what was built, or were too abstracted from it. Without
fully developing the point, Edward R. Burian has identified and defined this phenomenon
of polarization and straying, within the country’s architectural discourse, as an attitude of
9
“drift” that characterized an entire generation of modern Mexican architects. With Cetto,
we instead find an architect who writes from and for architecture while still referencing
10
the larger culture, but doing so from a disciplinary horizon. His writings, it is true, could
be more properly cataloged as architectural critique or even history. I would like to claim
Cetto’s place as a theorist, simultaneously understood in a broad and restricted sense that
defines it as the thought that emerges from the discipline. It is, in fact, the original mean-
ing of the Vitruvian theory, in which architecture is not only the buildings, nor even the
projects, but the knowledge of the architects: their science or métier. Under this perspective,
architecture and its theory would be practically identical. There’s no better way to recognize
this dual spirit of cultural consciousness and disciplinary self-consciousness in Cetto than
through his book Modern Architecture in Mexico.
In the same way that, in the first of his Ten Books of Architecture (De architectura), Vitru-
vius discusses that on which “architecture depends” (architectura constat), and in others, the
importance of other disciplines such as history, music, jurisprudence, etc., in his book, Cetto
constantly alternates his focus between architecture and the world. The book opens with a
definition, not of architecture but of the architect, taken from the prologue of the Ten Books
of Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti, the Florentine who, a millennium and a half after
Vitruvius, carried on the legacy of the Roman but updated it for his context:

Architectum ego hunc fore constituam, qui certa admiribilique ratione et via tum mente
animoque diffinire: tum et opere absolvere didicerit quaecumqe ex ponderum motu corporumque
compactione et coaugmentatione dignissimus hominum usibus bellissimi commodentur. 11

Despite how pedantic the inclusion of this Alberti fragment in its original Latin might
have seemed, Cetto’s intention was to remind his Mexican colleagues of both the specific
12
character and the venerable history of their profession. Despite being a trilingual work –in
German, English and Spanish– and therefore designed to have international dissemination,

7 Architect with whom Cetto collaborated upon his arrival in Mexico.
8 This was, in fact, a common complaint about Villagrán. See Joseph A. Baird Jr.’s book review, “Builders in the Sun: Five
Mexican Architects” (Hispanic American Review 48 – 2, May 1968), 312-3, and Augusto H. Alvarez, Historia oral de la
Ciudad de México, testimonios de sus arquitectos, Graciela de Garay, ed., (Mexico City: Institute de Investigaciones Doctor
J.M. Luis Mora, 1994), 14-5.
9 See Edward R. Burian, “The Architecture of Juan O’Gorman: Dichotomy and Drift,” in Edward R. Burian, ed.,
Modernity and the Architecture of Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 127-49.
10 The same could be said of some of his colleagues, for example, his fellow exile Vladimir Kaspé.
11 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 9. The translation of this text is included later on.
12 The fragment may have been a gesture acknowledging not only Alberti’s authority, but also that of a modern architect
he admired and who, like Poelzig, had distinguished himself by trying to give architecture its rightful place in culture:
Adolf Loos. In 1924, Loos had proposed his own (and very succinct) definition of the architect as “a mason who has
learned Latin.” See Adolf Loos “Ornament und Erziehung” (1924), in Trotzdem: 1900-1930 (Innsbruck: Brenner, 1931),
200-5.

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