Page 139 - Libro Max Cetto

Cristina López Uribe and Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez

Cetto’s introductory text begins with a well-known quote in Latin from Alberti’s De
Re Aedificatoria:

Him I consider the architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, knows
both how to devise through his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction,
whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble needs of man, by the movement
of weights and the joining and massing of bodies. 43

With this complex definition of the architect, the author situates his discourse within an
extensive historical period: that of modernity. By citing Alberti, the author starts out by
positioning Mexican architecture within the Western history of the discipline. A few para-
graphs later, he openly invites readers who do not like abstract theorizing to go directly to
the photographic catalog:

This would take us into the arid domain of architectural criticism or even of aesthetics,
and impatient readers –particularly busy architects– for whom the quotation from
Alberti at the very outset may have been heavy going, will turn to the illustrations. 44

As we will see later on, the discursive structures contained in this text were used inde-
pendently of the images in other contexts, such as in magazines and lectures delivered in
Mexico and abroad. Its narrative structure also formed the basis for a text that the author
wrote about Latin American architecture.
The historical analysis contained in the introductory text is different from the most
common reading among those Mexican architects who were responsible for constructing
the first narratives of modern architecture in the country. Cetto did not see modern archi-
tecture as being a product of the Mexican Revolution. Situated at a time of exhaustion in
modern architecture around the world, his proposal to find a solution to such exhaustion
seems to be based on a certain mannerism that anticipated Robert Venturi’s also-mannerist
stance. He found in the spatial and formal freedom of Mexican architecture a way out of the
monotony that he identified in the architecture of the International Style. His historical nar-
rative begins with pre-Hispanic architecture, passes through the Churrigueresque Baroque
and the colonial architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (which he ironizes
as Coca-Colonialism) before reaching the Modern Movement, a period that culminates in
45
the mannerism of the “daemonically bewildering strangeness” of Juan O’Gorman’s cave
house at the edge of Pedregal de San Ángel in Mexico City and in Candela’s work, the
constructive audacity of which “appeals to our sense of plasticity.” 46
According to Bettina Cetto, her father spent entire afternoons talking about pre-His-
panic art and architecture with Paul Westheim in his apartment in the Condesa neighbor-
hood of Mexico City. Westheim was a German historian, critic and art editor who went
into exile in Mexico in 1942. In his new country, he devoted himself to the study of Meso-
american art because, when he arrived, he sought “a book that would introduce [him] to this
art through its spiritual assumptions and creators” but did not find it. “What I was looking
for, an aesthetic of pre-Columbian art, I didn’t end up finding.” In 1950, after “about seven
years of intense work,” he published that book he could not find: Arte antiguo de México. 47

43 Battista Alberti, Leon, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor, translators
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997), 3.
44 Max Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 10.
45 See Modern Architecture in Mexico, 28.
46 See Modern Architecture in Mexico, 32. It should be noted that, despite these comments, the inclusion of most of
Candela’s works in the photographic catalog section (pages 122-125) was done belatedly and on the request of the pub-
lisher due to the fame that Candela had acquired in Germany. See letter from Hatje to Cetto, December 7, 1959 (AMCC).
47 Paul Westheim. Arte antiguo de México (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1950), 9.

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