Page 133 - Libro Max Cetto

Cristina López Uribe and Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez

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theim and the rest of the Germans in Mexico? Why was Cetto looking to be heard out-
side this country? Some of these answers can be guessed from the letter to Hatje mentioned
above. But we should also ask ourselves why, if Girsberger and Reinhold did not accept,
18
Hatje was interested and participated in the subsequent negotiation. To use Cetto’s words:
So, where does the value of a publication on Mexican architecture in Europe lie? 19
Surely the answer to this last question is related to the US campaign, conducted through
MoMA, to recruit Latin America as an ally during the Second World War, which was first
expressed in Brazil Builds (1943) and then through Latin American Architecture Since 1945
(1955), in conjunction with many other books on art in the region. For Americans, the spe-
cific case of Latin American architecture seemed to offer a viable alternative to the renewal
of modern architecture. In the context of the Cold War, with Germany dominated cultur-
ally and militarily by the US and NATO, it is possible to understand why books on Latin
American countries were being published. However, the quality of Mexican architecture in
the fifties is also undeniable, reaching levels that we have probably not equaled since and
already beginning to forge a certain alternative path in the face of the exhaustion of ratio-
nalist language or the crisis of symbolism in modern architecture, a symptom of which, for
more than a few locals and outsiders, was the architecture of University City and its murals.
Although some of these questions are partly explained by the correspondence held in
the archive, we may never have definitive answers to these questions, but approaching them
will allow us to conduct a critical reading of that object of which at first glance, it seems that
“we all possess essential knowledge,” but whose history, at least in Mexican architecture, we
have only begun to get to know: the book. 20
The publishers to which Cetto proposed his book published fully consecrated authors,
such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe or Walter Gropius. This meant that their publica-
tions had a fully secured audience and commercial market. Readers who bought the books
by these architects had known their works for decades: the Villa Savoy, the Bauhaus in Des-
sau and the Barcelona Pavilion, to name a few, were already of undisputed importance in
the history of Western architecture. The Mexican buildings that would form part of Cetto’s
book, with rare exceptions, were unknown in Germany and the rest of Europe. The authors
who wrote about these architects –such as Sigfried Giedion, Philip Johnson and Bruno
Zevi– were also internationally recognized, and were thus a guarantee for the commercial
success of almost any publishing project. By 1956, Max Cetto was still unknown as an
author and critic, both in Mexico and abroad. While his architectural work had been pub-
lished in several important outlets, it never had the same impact as that of those architects
already enshrined in this moment. This is where the extraordinary importance of his project
lies. How did Cetto convince one of the world’s most important publishers to include in its
catalog a book that featured very little –or no– buildings known internationally? How did
he manage to position himself at the same level as the most important authors of the time?
As we will see later, he did so because Mexican architecture had achieved a degree of mate-
rial and intellectual quality that it has probably never achieved again and because, as a critic,
theorist and historian, that is, as a thinker or intellectual of architecture, he built a cultural
universe that transcended frontiers.
Negotiations with Hatje began in January 1956, addressing the introductory text
and the languages in which it would be published. Cetto proposed a trilingual edition,

17 At the time, Mexico offered good alternatives, such as Espacios magazine’s architectural publishing house, run by the
architects Lorenzo Carrasco and Guillermo Rosell, with whom we can infer that he got along well.
18 See note 7.
19 See quoted text in page 131.
20 Amaranth Badger, The Book (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 14.

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