Page 116 - Libro Max Cetto

Max L. Cetto and the Territory of Architecture

his book was, in fact, explicitly aimed at them and its objective was to contribute to the
development of Mexican architecture: 13

I believe that one can do no better service to the architects of this country, which
stands apart by virtue of the sharpness of its contrasts and the ingenuousness of its
artistic expression, than to place their achievement within the general development of
architecture and, in this larger frame, see it as an example which has validity beyond
their own frontiers. 14

Conceived as a “service” to his colleagues, the book aimed to analyze the country’s
modern architecture with the double purpose of placing it in an international context and
demonstrating its value. In this passage, Cetto also recognized that “drift” identified by
Burian when talking about the “ingenuousness” or lack of consciousness (Unbefangenheit)
15
prevailing in Mexican art. Some lines above, when praising Mexicans for their “basic fee-
ling about life,” “outstanding aesthetic gift,” and the understanding of art “not merely as an
incidental adornment of existence, but […] felt to be an elemental expression of the human
urge to communicate,” Cetto had already warned that, for the country’s architects, “it is
not reflective reason which decides in favor of the achievements of modernity, but always a
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visual sense that eagerly responds to beauty.” It is important to now consider the content
of the Alberti fragment:

Him I consider the architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, knows
both how to devise through his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction,
whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble needs of man, by the movement
of weights and the joining and massing of bodies. 17

Although omitted by Cetto, the continuation and conclusion of the passage reads as
follows: “To do this he must have an understanding and knowledge of all the highest and
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most noble disciplines. This then is the architect.” Considered in its entirety, the Alberti
passage synthesized, in just a few lines, the main message of Vitruvius’ first book, which,
as we have said, alternated the exposition of specifically architectural principles with the
external knowledge that architects should have in order to achieve a “liberal education”
(encyclios disciplina). In order to excuse himself from the alleged discomfort that the Alberti
epigraph could cause to his audience of Mexican architects, Cetto assured that he did not
try to “bore them with abstract theorizing” since he himself defined architecture as “that
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which is created by architects.” Apparently deceptive, this definition has a solid historical

13 It is also a pity that the book did not have better distribution inside the country and that there was no review published
in any of the most important specialized print media, especially the magazines Arquitectura-México and Arquitectos de
México.
14 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 11.
15 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 11.
16 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 10.
17 Alberti, Leon Battista, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor, translators
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 3.
18 In the original: “Quae ut possit, comprehensione et cognitione opus est rerum optimarum et dignissimarum. Itaque huiusmodi
erit architectos.”
19 Indeed, before the word “architecture” was coined toward the end of the Roman republic, the word “architect” in its
Greek (architekton) and Latin (architectus) equivalents had already been in existence for several centuries. It was this
word, in fact, that created the need to have a name for what architects do. This is a particularity of our discipline that
distinguishes it from other arts –whether “liberal” or “mechanical”– in that it is categorically rooted in the practical, or
rather the poietic, from which it came. Aristotle classified architecture, along with the other arts, as a “productive habit
accompanied by true reason” (lógou alethoús poietiké). See Aristotle, Ética Nicomaquea – Política (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1967),
76. A better translation is “truly reasoned production,” which stands in close relation to his orthós lógos or “just reason.” Et.
Nic. Z, 4; 1140 a 5-10. See Enrique Dussel, Filosofía de la producción (Bogotá: Nueva América, 1984), 40, 190-192, 227.

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