Page 124 - Libro Max Cetto

Max L. Cetto and the Territory of Architecture

In a country where […] the sun is so strong and the climate so mild that there is
scarcely any need for temperature control if the house is properly situated and the door
and window openings of an appropriate size, it is stupid to impair such a fortunate
balance by floor-to-ceiling-glass-curtains on all four sides. 61

Although this critique applied to apartment buildings and office buildings as well, as
illustrated in other parts of the book, it is interesting that Cetto chose the house as his ex-
ample. It is possible that he was thinking of his own house in El Pedregal. Six years before
his book was published, his house had been exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA) as part of the exhibition Latin American Architecture Since 1945. In the exhibi-
tion catalog, the historian Henry Russell-Hitchcock found in Mexico’s domestic architec-
ture “considerable variety of approach, from the traditional structure and heavy solid effects
of Barragan’s own house, based on local peasant ways of building but highly sophisticated
in its simplicity, to the Miesian lightness of Artigas’ work.” 62
On the following spread, Hitchcock included, on the left page, an image of Barragán’s
63
gardens in El Pedregal, and, on the right, two images: above, Cetto’s house, and below,
Artigas’ Gómez house, both in that same modern residential subdivision. Given the layout
of the images, this spread could be interpreted as a comparison of two different attitudes
toward the country’s landscape and climate: on the one hand, the Gómez house manifests
a great freedom and autonomy in relation to its grounds, with the stone chimney being
the only element evoking topographic continuity, and on the other, the Cetto house mani-
fests its categorical belonging to the land, but with a concrete frame system likewise freely
uprooted from it: indeed, an architecture “set among earth and sky, trees, water, and other
64
buildings.” Interestingly, Cetto included Artigas’ house in his book, praising its distribu-
tion and qualifying its placement as being as valid as others, but criticizing the lack of pro-
tection given by its facade against the intense sunlight and the inadequateness of its curtains
65
to filter it out. His criticism of houses with floor-to-ceiling windows on all four sides may,
in fact, have referred to this house, whose main body was defined in such way. Cetto’s house,
on the contrary, both in its volumetry and in its individual spaces, demonstrated that correct
orientation, careful sizing and control of the ambient temperature he recommended. One
of its spaces, the upper terrace, demonstrated this didactically, on all four sides: all of them
oriented in the cardinal directions, all with different material qualities, all in close connec-
tion to the human activities carried out within.

The Second Front: Nationalist Architecture

The second front of Cetto’s critique of modern architecture in Mexico was that of nation-
alist architecture, which he saw as another manifestation of mannerism. Cetto not only
considered Mexico to be subject to the cyclical succession of classicist and mannerist styles,
but Mexican art and architecture to themselves be mannerist. O’Gorman represented the
embodiment of this phenomenon, since his work flowed from the rationalist functional-
ism of his schools to the irrational expressionism of his own home in El Pedregal. Cetto
considered the “daemonically bewildering strangeness” of this house as product of both
66
“speculation and mania.” Praising the imagination shown by O’Gorman in this project,

61 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 27-28.
62 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Latin American Architecture Since 1945 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 45.
63 Wrongly identified as this architect’s house.
64 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 10.
65 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 82.
66 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 27.

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