Page 137 - Libro Max Cetto

Cristina López Uribe and Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez

texts do not simply work in parallel but generate a tension through which the reader under-
36
stands the author’s arguments. These books, as Giedion explained in Bauen in Frankreich,
are like two books in one because they provide the possibility of only looking at the photos
and understanding, through looking at them and reading their explanations, the message
of the author. This was a courtesy to the “hurried reader.” Like most twentieth-century
architectural books, Cetto’s builds its arguments with images. In a photo book, text natu-
37
rally takes on a secondary role. It is an “illustrated narrative” that reverses the traditional
reading logic: instead of a series of illustrations used to support a text, the sequence of im-
ages itself articulates the argument, and so the selection of photographs and drawings takes
on extreme importance. 38
Cetto insisted that certain images should be included at all costs, despite their apparent
inconsistency or that the object portrayed was not “aesthetic,” as they allowed him to include
his critical comments. For example, it was disconcerting that he included a photograph of
the Escuela Superior de Ingeniería y Arquitectura (ESIA) building that had collapsed with the
1957 earthquake, even more so when we remember that virtually every book on modern
architecture at the time focused on celebrating its structural qualities, never its weaknesses.
Similarly, the editors found it incomprehensible that the author insisted on publishing a
photograph of the steel truss of the theater in the UNAM’s National School of Architecture,
designed by José Villagrán. Cetto saw such truss as a very badly resolved detail. Such was
also the case with the Medalla Milagrosa church by Félix Candela: the publisher asked
him to remove an unfortunate photograph foregrounding the bell tower, whose inclusion
Cetto defended in order to accommodate a critical commentary about how it “lack(s) the
39
cohesion which determines the architectural quality of a building.” However, this strategy
to include images that could be considered negative or critical of the subject of the book is
clearer in the introductory essay and the urban study. In the latter, a sole image of a com-
pletely dried out Venice is presented –the painting Venice Without Water by Fabrizio Clarici–
a premonition of the catastrophic future that our author imagined for Mexico City. 40

The Temptation of America or Max Cetto’s Book Culture

In Mexico, only a few of the many books on modern architecture that Cetto possessed
in his youth have been preserved, including Walter Curt Behrendt’s Städtebau und Woh-
nungswesen in den Vereinigten Staaten (Urban Design and Housing in the United States),
published in Berlin in 1926. Although the other books on this subject that have been
41
preserved in Cetto’s foreign archives are very important, Städtebau is especially relevant
because it expresses a common condition among young modern European architects which,
although sometimes mentioned, has been little studied: the enormous fascination they felt

36 André Tavares, "Modern Clumsiness. Liberated Living and Sigfried Giedion’s Loom,” in The Anatomy of the Architec-
tural Book (Zürich: Canadian Centre for Architecture, Lars Müller, 2015), 73.
37 Letter from Giedion to Füssli, November 23, 1928. Cited in Tavares, The Anatomy of the Architectural Book, 77.
38 The editors were very conscious that the reading of such books was not linear. A letter from Wolfgang Pehnt responds
to Cetto’s annoyance at the publisher’s painstaking work looking for errors: “Let me say that you’re certainly right when
you say we have our noses in your text. In fact, I think not only the general composition should be taken into account, but
also the details, especially with such a book, since a large number of readers will not proceed systematically in its reading,
so every page has to resist criticism on its own.” Letter from Hatje to Cetto, September 28, 1959 (AMCC).
39 See Modern Architecture in Mexico, page 36. Cetto advocated the inclusion of this critical commentary until the early
1960s and the use of the word “consistency” rather than “aesthetic context” to refer to Chapter 8 of the Geoffrey Scott book
The Architecture of Humanism (1914). See letter from Cetto to Hatje, March 6, 1960 (AMCC).
40 See Modern Architecture in Mexico, 169.
41 Officially, Cetto’s personal library is held by the Deutsches Architektur Museum (DAM) in Frankfurt; however, some
books are preserved in Coyoacán and there are probably several others in the UAM Azcapotzalco archive. Bettina Cetto
has been told by some architects that her mother gave away books to interested visitors.

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