Page 138 - Libro Max Cetto

The Story of a Book. Modern Architecture in Mexico Cristina López Uribe and Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez

for the United States. The copy preserved in the Coyoacán archive shows strong signs of use,
which might suggest that Cetto was deeply attracted to American cities and architecture.
Perhaps more important than the book itself are the postcards and newspaper clippings
kept inside, since they all refer to the United States. Behrendt’s book is part of a universe
of publications that defined the vision that European architects had of the United States
during the interwar period. Indeed, not a few of the most important figures in modern
architecture on that continent wrote books on the United States, such as Een drietal lez-
ingen in Amerika gehouden (1912) by Hendrik Petrus Berlage and Amerika, Bilderbuch eines
Architeckten (1926) by Erich Mendelson. This European publishing universe also contained
countless magazine articles that constantly discussed the architecture of the United States,
such as in the magazine Sovremennaya Arkhitektura, edited by Moisei Ginzburg and Alek-
sandr Vesnin. This is not the place to discuss the importance of American architecture
in Europe, but these documents suggest future lines of research that would broaden the
horizons of what has so far been considered to underpin the thinking of the European
Cetto, that is, those based on a romantic Expressionism, on a modernist heroism –likewise
romantic– through his work on Ernst May’s Frankfurt or on a Frank Lloyd Wright reduced
to the organic.
However, Europeans’ increasingly deeper interest in the architecture of the United
States did not mean, even remotely, that they had a clear idea of Mexico and its modern
architecture. It is easily recognizable that the image of Mexican architecture in Europe was
made up almost exclusively of pre-Hispanic and, if anything else, some colonial buildings.

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As mentioned before, Modern Architecture in Mexico is, above all, a powerful visual narra-
tive based on photographs and plans, but it is also a complex intellectual discourse based
on written language (present in the introductory text, in the urban study and in the images’
explanatory texts), illuminating the architectural thinking of a particularly rich, complex
historical moment. Despite having studied in Berlin in the 1920s and begun his work in
an innovative environment (alongside Ernst May and his team in Frankfurt from 1925 to
1930), Cetto’s architectural thinking in Modern Architecture in Mexico is much more embed-
ded in a classical tradition of architecture than in the combative, disruptive positions of
42
interwar artistic culture. As noted in his first letter to Hatje, with its reference to CIAM,
by the mid-fifties, the author already had a much more mature –and critical– perspective on
the architecture of the heroic twenties than during the interwar period.
In the introductory text, the language is sometimes clearly aimed at a foreign reader
and yet there are other instances in which it is difficult not to wonder how that same reader
would be able to understand certain topics that could surely only be understood by people
familiar with Mexico and its culture. One of the great virtues of this text is that, being
a work written in a foreign language and published in another country, it encompasses a
cultural universe greater than the local, that is, it forces the Spanish-speaking reader to
immerse themselves in a dialogue that transcends their traditional cultural boundaries. It
also differentiates itself from other books on modern Mexican architecture written by for-
eigners by the fact that its author lived more than half of his life in our country. Although
his gaze is doubtlessly that of a European more than anything else, it is still permeated by
his adoptive culture.

42 See note 7.

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