Page 131 - Libro Max Cetto

Cristina López Uribe and Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez

In a December 1955 letter, Cetto gave the publisher Gerd Hatje his address in Cannes
(where he lived for a short period) to continue the conversation about his book on Mexican
architecture. This letter gives us some clues about how he promoted the idea of his editorial
project:

Highly esteemed Mr. Hatje [...] I regret that we didn’t have more time in Stuttgart to
exchange views. Some questions we asked were left in the air. One of them that comes
to mind now was, for example, the CIAM. I can imagine that you were a little surprised
by my negative comment, after I myself had been participating in CIAM congresses as
its youngest member since 1927. 6
However, I am of the opinion that the situation is now substantively different because modern
architecture is no longer threatened from the outside and therefore does not require manifestos.
Today she is threatened by the conformism that reigns in her own ranks. Overcoming this is the
task of the individual, who asserts all his talent from one job to another to more clearly express
the ideas of our time.
Only by addressing our tasks from scratch, radically and without intellectual arrogance, can
we avoid the risk of these ideas being petrified and blocking currents in the future. That’s why
the loners, whose natural talent threatens to break the doctrine over and over again, are more
important today than sects like CIAM, whose work is celebrated.
This is also where the value of a publication on Mexican architecture in Europe lies, namely, in
the particularly stimulating aspect of individual achievements. 7

The great interest of the publisher becomes evident in the fact that, just one week later,
one of its editors wrote to Cetto to inform him: “Before leaving, Mr. Hatje asked me that,
as soon as we had your address, to draw up the draft contract for the Mexico book. [...] May
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I hear from you soon?” However, several months would pass before the contract was signed,
as it would have to go through a long negotiation during which, on several occasions, the
project was jeopardized. The audacity with which the contract was negotiated expresses the
confidence of its author in the book’s importance and relevance. Despite the manifest inter-
est of Gerd Hatje, Cetto continued to promote his book project with other major publishers.
On March 13, 1956, Max Cetto wrote a letter to the renowned Swiss publisher
Girsberger in which he proposed the Mexico book. Among its many now-legendary
publications, Hans Girsberger’s press published Le Corbusier’s 1957 Complete Works –and
other books by the same author, including Un petit maison (1954), the first in the series
“Carnets de la recherche patiente”– W. Boesigner’s 1951 book Richard Neutra and Sigfried
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Giedion’s ciam: A Decade of New Architecture (1951). Nearly two months later, he received
a negative response. The Zürich editor argued that Myers’ book Mexico’s Modern Architecture
would compete with a new publication on the same subject and, moreover, that its reception
as an “illustrated book” had been bad. 10
While making contact with Girsberger, Cetto sent letters to the US publisher
Reinhold. Located in New York, it published the magazine Progressive Architecture and
promoted itself as “the world’s leading publisher of professional architectural books.”
The kind of books it published at the time included Stamo Papadaki’s The Work of Oscar
Niemeyer (1951) and George E. Kidder Smith’s Italy Builds (1956). William W. Atkin, the
publisher’s Architectural Book Division manager, gave a negative response on September

6 The author probably doesn’t remember the exact date, since CIAM was founded in 1928, but perhaps he was thinking of
the jury’s ruling in the 1927 competition for the design of the Palace of Nations in Geneva –in which Cetto participated–
which was one of the historical precedents for the founding of the CIAM.
7 Letter from Cetto to Hatje, December 28, 1955 (AMCC).
8 Letter from Kaspar to Cetto, January 2, 1956 (AMCC).
9 Catherine de Smet, Le Corbusier: Architect of Books (Baden: Lars Müller, 2005), 18.

10 Letter from Girsberger to Cetto, Zürich, May 2, 1956 (AMCC).

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