Page 129 - Libro Max Cetto

The Story of a Book.
Modern Architecture in Mexico:

An X-ray of the Fifties

Cristina López Uribe
Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez

ixty-six years ago, Max Cetto set out to publish a “contemporary compendium” of the
Sarchitecture that was being produced in Mexico, the country where he had arrived in
1939 and where he had developed his career as an architect ever since. Two decades later,
and after multiple negotiations with the prestigious Stuttgart publishing house Gerd Hatje,
the book –published in two simultaneous bilingual editions– came out. This text proposes,
first, the history of the creation of the book via his correspondence with the publisher, high-
lighting the expectations of the Germans who worked on the book and the intentions of its
author to show what he considered important in architecture in Mexico, with a clear op-
erational discourse addressed to an international audience of the late fifties. It also proposes
to analyze his critical and historical discourse and judge its relevance in the panorama of
twentieth-century architectural publications.
This essay has come about after immersion in a series of documents: clippings, mockups,
postcards, letters and exchanges with the publisher, all of which are preserved in Max Cetto’s
1
family archive in the Coyoacán district of Mexico City. This research was based mainly on
the correspondence and on two incomplete sets of mockups of the book, the pages of which
feature reproductions of images affixed with glue and simulated hand-drawn text boxes. The
publisher periodically sent these models to the author to have a basis on which to discuss
and negotiate the process of putting the book together. The existence of this archive repre-
sented a great boon for us, as the research was carried out in November and December 2020,
that is, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, so it would have been impossible to consult any of the
sites where Max Cetto’s archive is protected in a fragmented fashion. 2
Our text aims to reconstruct the history behind the creation of one of the fundamen-
tal books for the study of twentieth-century architecture in Mexico in general and, more
specifically, that of the fifties, as this publication continued a series of books that reviewed
the major works of their respective decades: The New Architecture in Mexico by Esther Born
reviews architecture from 1925 to 1937, Mexico’s Modern Architecture by Irving E. Myers
3
–with an important role played by Enrique Yáñez and Ruth Rivera in the selection of the
material– the forties and Max Cetto’s Modern Architecture in Mexico the fifties.
The study of the history behind Cetto’s book reveals a series of negotiations between the
sophisticated, important German publisher Gerd Hatje and Max Cetto, an architect already
acclimatized to the Mexican environment who, however, kept an eye on the international
context (difficult to find in Mexican architects), having been part of the European avant-

1 Here we refer to the documentary archive of Bettina Cetto. Pieces of furniture designed by the architect, books that
come from his library, pictures painted by him, as well as the ever-increasing digital archive of the researcher and daughter
of Max Cetto make up this archive. We will refer to it with the acronym AMCC.
2 Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Azcapotzalco, the Getty Center and the Deutsches Architektur Museum (DAM).
During our research, we sent emails to these three locations, none of which answered as they usually do.
3 The graphic content of the book corresponds to the exhibition Arquitectura mexicana contemporánea 1950 (Contemporary
Mexican Architecture 1950), organized by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA).

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