Page 125 - Libro Max Cetto

Juan Manuel Heredia

Cetto confessed, however, that he, as an architect, “inhabited more temperate intellectual
climates.” More importantly, he felt that this house went “farther than the tropic of archi-
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tecture, on to the pole beyond which no path leads.” In the same way he argued that “prob-
ably O’Gorman would be in complete agreement if he were told that his creation cannot be
considered architecture in the strict sense, for he has never attached importance to preserv-
68
ing the dividing lines between the various branches of art.” However, he also recognized
that, without people like O’Gorman, “we should remain in ignorance of the frontiers of our
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own world,” thus simultaneously praising his friend’s talent and effort and criticizing it to
reaffirm the disciplinary territory, the object of his book.
While, for Cetto, the growing interest in pre-Columbian decorations by Mexican archi-
tects was a clear example of mannerism, his judgment here was not monolithic: on the one
hand, he considered the houses that showed such exterior decorations to be ridiculous (prob-
ably an allusion to the domestic architecture of Enrique Yáñez), but on the other, was toler-
ant of institutional buildings that did the same, under the justification that they were works
with greater symbolic charge. The clearest example of the latter was the newly-completed
University City in the nation’s capital. Cetto commended the power, pleasure and daring
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shown by its architects, but also criticized the improvised nature of the enterprise and the
problems of proportion, orientation and relationship with the landscape that, he observed,
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had already been pointed out by foreign critics. Despite his tolerant attitude, Cetto was
skeptical of this trend, especially in cases in which the desire for national representation was
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prioritized over the proper resolution of architectural problems. In one of his most bril-
liant, categorical statements, he argued that “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.” 73
Having mentioned the theme of nationalism, Cetto said he felt the need to address the
ideology underlying this discourse: that of “integration.” Against the originality claimed by
the movement’s protagonists, mostly painters, Cetto reminded his readers that the idea of the
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integration of the arts could be found in both art nouveau and the Bauhaus. Cetto rightly
emphasized the great influence that Mexican muralists had exerted on the country’s ar-
chitecture, but believed that the main problem with the integration they promoted lay in
the discrepancy between the figurative nature of muralism and the abstraction and avant-
garde heritage of modern architecture. For Cetto, muralism had stagnated in realist forms
of representation, mainly due to propagandistic considerations, and was therefore anti-
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architectural. In nearly every attempt at integration in University City, he thus saw the op-
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posite of the desired goal: disintegration. For him, “by far the most convincing decorative
work” in the complex is that provided by O’Gorman’s stone mosaics covering the Central
Library. Against the self-criticism of their creator (in which he blamed not the mosaics,
but the architecture of the building, for not being in accordance with the realistic language

67 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 27.
68 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 212.
69 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 29.
70 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 29.
71 See note 35.
72 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 29.
73 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 29.
74 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 215, n. 15.
75 Here he agreed with Giedion, who disdained social realism, seeing in it a great ideological burden that hindered a true
synthesis of the arts. As secretary-general of the CIAM, Giedion saw in the abstractionist and cubist avant-gardes that
essential filter in the move toward architectural modernity, and those avant-gardes were therefore the most apt to generate
such a synthesis. Sigfried Giedion, Architecture, You and Me: The Diary of a Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1958), 79-92.
76 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 30.

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