The Preservation of Historic Architecture and the Beliefs of the Modern Movement in

Mexico: 1914–1963
Author(s): Enrique X. de Anda Alanís
Source: Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and
Criticism , Winter 2009, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 58-73
Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25835064

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i. Plaza de las Tres Culturas (The Plaza of the Three Cultures), watercolor rendering. Conjunto urbano, "Presidente Lopez
Mateos" (Nonoalco-Tlatelolco), (Mexico: Banco Nacional Hipotecario Urbano y de Obras Publicas, S.A., 1963), 216.

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Enrique X. de Anda Alams
The Preservation of Historic
Architecture and the Beliefs of
the Modern Movement in Mexico:
1914-1963

This article explores the role of Mexican modernist architects

in conceiving the cultural and architectural significance of
Mexico's patrimony. The period in question spans from 1914
to 1963 and focuses on architects living in Mexico City. The
choice of the bracketing years stems from two milestone
events: in 1914, architect Federico Mariscal gave an influential
series of lectures on historic Mexican architecture; in 1963,
the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (the Plaza of Three Cultures) in
Mexico City was completed (Figure 1). The preservation of the
architecture of the previous centuries was a critical compo
nent of the intellectual battles from the 1910s onward,1 and
was to remain a cultural problem that in some cases became
an official undertaking of the Mexican state, and in other
cases merged with the ethos of the modern movement.2
Indeed, Mexican architects theorized and designed built
works that investigated the nature of the country's architec
tural patrimony well before the Mexican state issued formal
preservation legislation, which occurred only in 1938 and
1946, with the creation of government bodies charged with
the preservation of Mexican cultural heritage.3 The intellectual
foment in Mexico also predated the promulgation of the two
key international preservation agreements of the twentieth
century, the Athens Charter (1931) and the Venice Charter
(1964), which defined cultural heritage as a collective legacy
of mankind to be preserved. Most Mexican modernist archi
tects of this period, despite their adherence to the idea of a
new architecture, nevertheless followed the idea of preserving
the physical legacy of the past and its link to a wider, histori
cally contiguous notion of "Mexicanness."
Before continuing, however, the distinction between the
modern movement and the wider constellation of Mexican
architects should be made clear. Even though the first built
works of European modernism (those of Le Corbusier, Walter
Gropius, J. J. P. Oud, and others) corresponded in Mexico with
the first buildings by Jose Villagran (1925-1927) and Juan
O'Gorman (1928-1929),4 Mexican modernist architecture
Future Anterior
must be understood in the broader context of the new cultural
Volume VI, Number 2
Winter 2009 programs that were endorsed by Jose Vasconcelos,5 the

59

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 founder in 1922 of the Secretaria de Educacion Publica (Public
Education Ministry), and were later influential in the architec
tural projects of O'Gorman and Enrique Yanez among others.6
At the time, the graduates of the National School of Architec
ture (the only school of architecture at the time in Mexico) had
tended to view history based on the official high school pro
grams and linked to the idea of preservation, and it is that
influential circle of architects and theorists around which this
half-century of history of preservation in Mexico revolves.

Federico Mariscal: Motherland and National Architecture

The university lectures taught by Federico Mariscal beginning
in 1914 were critical to the establishment of new architectural
ethos toward the Mexican past in the twentieth century.
Mariscal's role in the architects guild automatically makes
him the object of special historical attention,7 and his theo
retical stance reached a wider audience with the 1915 publica
tion of his La patria y la arquitectura nacional (The Motherland
and National Architecture)8 (Figure 2). The book took as its
subject the architecture of the viceregal period in Mexico
(1521-1821) and argued that the buildings of that era in Mex
ico held equivalent architectural significance to European
buildings of the same period. With this historical finding,
Mariscal proposed that viceregal architecture was integral to
Mexican culture and, thus, a primary element of the Mexican
identity.9
Mariscal was not the first to make these observations,10
but his contribution was critical as an opponent to the demoli
tion of the architecture of that era. The most salient part of his
defense of viceregal architecture was his concept of "mother
land and nation." Although both terms are somewhat equiva
lent, "motherland" (patria) as an idea in Mariscal's work alludes
to the geography, population, and identity of the inhabitants
anchored in the past, the sum of which makes social coher
ence possible in the present. "Nation" (nacion) signifies the
notion of physical territory, connected of course to the histori
cal events that took place in those borders. Mariscal can be
called the originator of the intellectual framework with which
Mexican architects of the period established their ethos,
making them not only creators of a new architecture but also
rendering them responsible for the custody of a collective cul
tural legacy, or, as Mariscal would say, a national legacy.
Mariscal's theoretical position can be summarized in a
selection of writing from La patria y la arquitectura nacional:

love of the motherland is one of the most powerful sources

of solidarity... therefore the buildings [that stand] on the

60

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 CLASIF.
ADQUIS.
FtCHA:.
PROCED.
S.

la. de Aztecas Num. 5.

La Patria y la Arquitectura Nacional.

Conferencias del Sr. 3Srq. Federico Mariscal
I.
LA CASA.

Entre los elementos que constituyen la nocion de Patria, indudablemente esta comprendi
da la casa que vivimos y las que viven nuestros parientes, nuestros amigos, los representantes de
nuestro Gobierno y todos nuestros conciudadanos. El amor a la Patria es uno de tantos podero
sos elementos de solidaridad y, por tanto, de los fundamentales para la vida del hombre como
miembro de una nacion; deben por tanto amarse los edificios del suelo en que nacimos como una
parte constitutiva de nuestra Patria. Pero para que estos edificios realmente sean nuestros, deben
ser la fiel expresion de nuestra vida, de nuestras costumbres, y estar de acuerdo con nuestro pai
saje, es decir, con nuestro suelo y nuestro clima. Los que asf sean, son los unicos que merecen ese
amor, y al mismo tiempo, son los unicos que pueden llamarse obras de arte arquitectonico na
cional.
No podn'amos destruir ninguno de los elementos que constituyen nuestra Patria, sin lasti
mar nuestro amor a ella, ni podrfamo.. tampoco cambiarlos aun cuando fuera por el solo hecho de
imitar elementos mejores de otra nacion; de igual manera, no debemos camblar ni mucho inencs
destruir, ninguno de nuestros edificiosi que merezcun el nombre de obras He arte arqritect ^iicc
nacional, pues aun cuando revelaren uWamente la vida y las costumbies ya pasadas, esas consti
tuyen nuestra tradici6n, y el verdadero amor a la Patria debe comprender el amor a nuestros an
tepasados y lo que ellos hicieron por ella y tambien el amor a los que nos siguen, que sc d pode
mos hacer patente, o por las obras que les leguemos, o por las que les trasmitamos despues de
haberlas conservado mtegramente como herencia de nuestros abuelos.
Solo puede amarse lo que se conoce bien, y como el amor a todo lo que es la Patria cons
tituye ademas un deber, estamos obligados a conocer bien cuales son esas obras de arte arquitec
tonico nacional que merece ese nombre, que constituyen una parte de nuestra Patria. Los que de
un modo especial nos hemos dedicado al Arte Arquitect6nico y hemos adquirido los conocimien
tos en nuestro propio pai's, estamos obligados mas que ninguno a darselos a conocer a todos nues
tros conciudadanos.
El Arte Arquitectonico Mexicano merece especial estudio aun comparado con el de los
otros pai'ses: es el mas importante de toda la America, y, sin embargo, muy pocos?especialmen
te Mexicanos?lo conocen bien, y menos aun lo han estudiado y dado a conocer a los demas.
iCwdl es el Arte Arquitectonico Nacional? Para contestar esta pregunta basta decir: el que
revele la vida y las costumbres mas generates durante toda la vida de Mexico como nacion.
El ciudadano mexicano actual, el que forma la mayoria de la poblacion, es el resultado de
una mezcla material, moral e intelectual de la raza espanola y de las razas aborigenes que pobla
ron el suelo mexicano. Por tanto, la arquitectura mexicana tiene que ser la que surgio y se des
arrollo durante tres siglos virreynales en los que se constituyo el mexicano que despues se ha des
arrollado en vida independiente. Esa arquitectura es la que debe sufrir todas las transformacio
nes necesarias, para revelar en los edificios actuales las modificaciones que haya sufrido de en
tonces aca la vida del mexicano, Desgraciadamente se detuvo esa evoluci6n, y por iniluencias exo
ticas?en general muy inferiores a las originales,?se ha ido perdiendo la Arquitectura Nacional;
s61o, y esto es lo mas sensible, porque se construyen edificios que podian ser los de cualquier
otro pais porque no revelan la vida mexicana, sino porque se han destrui'do y modificado barba
ramente los hermosi'simos ejemplares de nuestra arquitectura.
Aun es tiempo de hacer renacer nuestro propio Arte Arquitectonico, y para esto, estudie
mos la vida de la epoca en que surgio y se desarrollo y la vida actual y veamos c6mo coinciden
en muchos puntos y por tanto c6mo es posible aumentar esa herencia de nuestros antepasados;
pero sobre todo y, esto por lo pronto es lo fundamental, evitemos que se destruya lo que nos que
da, no pertenece a nosotros unicamente, es la herencia que tenemos obligacion de dejar a nues
tros hijos.

2. Title page of Federico Mariscal, La patria y la arquitectura nacional, 1915.

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 ground on which we were born, a constitutive part of
our motherland, ought to be cherished ... we must not
change, much less destroy, any of buildings that de
serve the name of national architectural art... one can
only love what one knows well and, since love to all that
motherland is implies a duty, we are [in addition] com
pelled to learn what those national works of architec
tural art are.11

Mariscal in the book also put forward a thesis of cultural and

ethnic cross-breeding (mestizaje), explaining that the pres
ence of this mestizaje became the foundation for a new way of
thinking, beyond French positivism, which had been a compo
nent of the Mexican teaching programs at the end of nine
teenth century. The "Mexican citizen," Mariscal wrote, is a
"mixture of racial, moral, and intellectual material of the
Spanish race and of the races of the aborigines.. .therefore,
Mexican architecture must be what emerged and developed
from the three centuries of the viceregal period .. ."12 His intro
duction to La patria y la arquitectura nacional closes with the
forceful message: "let us impede that, that which remains
with us and belongs to us only be destroyed, since it is the
legacy that we ?by obligation ?shall leave in inheritance to
our children"13 (Figure 3).

The Institutionalization of Preservation

Mariscal's call for the preservation of Mexico's architectural
heritage was motivated by an ethics of civil responsibility.
Two decades would pass, however, before the Mexican state
made an official commitment to the preservation of the archi
tecture of the past. In January 1939, the Instituto Nacional de
Antropologfa e Historia (INAH) was founded; its first director
was archeologist Alfonso Caso, a member of the intellectual
clique that had given shape to new Mexican cultural institu
tions following the social revolution of 1910. An act of sover
eignty was implicit in the political decision to create an official
preservation body: the autonomy of the Mexican nation over
the physical record of its past, which came from all the cul
tures within the territorial boundaries that would later become
the Mexican state. INAH was charged with restoring, docu
menting, and safeguarding all material remains from both the
Mesoamerican and the Spanish viceregal periods in Mexican
history. Again, the footprints of the National University figure
large in this story: the second director of the INAH (from 1944
1956) was Ignacio Marquina, a graduate in architecture from
the National University,14 who was in charge of the research
on Mesoamerican architecture.

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 I ki

lit4

fit9

-- W,

411

i-t

* 1 -li

3. Palacio del Conde de Jaral de

InBerrio,
1945, the Mexican state took another im
Mexico City, originally from a photo
the subject
graph in Federico Mariscal, La patria y
of preservation of goods from t
ber
la arquitectura nacional, as 31, the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Arte
published
in Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, 4000 anos
tute of Fine Arts, INBA) was established. The
de arquitectura mexicana (Mexico City:
corresponded to INAH in responsibilities bu
Sociedad de Arquitectos Mexicanos,
Colegio Nacional de Arquitectos Mexi
exclusively with Mexican artistic output afte
canos, 1956), 105.
mission was to "safeguard, promote, sponsor
strengthen all artistic forms in which the sp
expressed and defined." In order to execute i
sibilities, INBA was organized into departme
each artistic discipline, with architecture as o

63

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 presumed its "official" acceptance into the field of the fine
arts. The first director of the department was Enrique Yanez, a
modernist architect who from the 1930s onward had helped
promote European functionalist architecture in Mexico.15
Carlos Chavez, a composer and INBA's first director,
wrote that the teaching of architecture was not a charge of
INBA, but that its dissemination and promotion was, as a "con
structive criticism about important architectural problems."16
Yanez wrote in 1952 that the responsibility of the INBA was
"to divulge the artistic [architectural] output of the nation"
and that "architecture... had tried to become a national
expression in the period immediately following the armed
struggle [of 1910]."17
During the six years in which Yanez served as director of
the Architecture Department of INBA, he organized an exhibi
tion titled "Modern Mexican Architecture," in which a number
of works from 1925 to 1950 had been selected by Yanez him
self, along with a group of important architects who identified
themselves as modernists.18 However, aside from other promo
tional tasks, what is most interesting is the exhibition named
"Arquitectura Popular en Mexico" (Popular Architecture in
Mexico), which took place in the Palace of Fine Arts in 1953
and was published in a monograph.19 It is critical to underline
the significance that Yanez placed on popular or vernacular
Mexican architecture, not only as a historical matter, but also
as a cultural component whose genesis had to be explored in
order to identify any constituent elements of national identity
within it. These popular expressions were to be conserved
and studied as historical resources, which would then sub
sequently contribute to the design of modern architecture.
Yanez, who held himself as one of the most committed fun
cionalistas (as the followers of the modern movement were
known in Mexico), recognized the potential originality of pop
ular architecture as a source of inspiration that was alien to
the academy and its theoretical doctrines.
Chavez alongside Yanez expressed this view in the texts
that they both contributed to the book Arquitectura popular
de Mexico, writing that to solve the "question" of Mexican
architecture would require determining how vernacular archi
tecture could contribute to it: "Up to what point can or should
Mexican architecture be Mexican ... [before] its quality of
beautiful art as well as its national character become a prob
lem," Chavez wrote in his introduction.20 Yanez stated that
the goal of the exhibition was "to clarify whether our modern
architecture could also be considered as Mexican"21 (Figure
4). Yanez connected European theories of modern architecture
to the historical tradition of Mexican vernacular architecture:

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 IL

Ink" t

A4,

AMF"

4. Cover, Arquitectura popular en"These acquisitions [meaning the ideas, theories, and
Mexico (Mexican Popular Architecture).
tectonic shapes coming from abroad], which in a great pa
Photography by Gabriel Garcia Maroto.
signify progress, inasmuch as they imply that which is u
sal in modern man, ought to go along with an eagerness
internal knowledge that may expose our peculiarities."2
The project of modern architecture in Mexico was ba
on the idea of permanence (and therefore of preservatio
of tradition, an attitude that was also institutional, as t

65

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 viewpoint of the official Mexican architectural body, la
Sociedad de Arquitectos Mexicanos, makes clear. In 1956,
Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, president of the guild, sponsored
and was the editor of a photo book titled 4000 anos de
arquitectura mexicana (Four thousand Years of Mexican
Architecture),23 a selection of buildings built in Mexico since
2000 bce. The book tied contemporary architecture to the
far past and showed that Mexican architects were part of a
great historical continuity: the pre-Columbian pyramids, the
churches of the viceregal period, and the present all formed
one unbroken history. Vazquez wrote: "we feel we are the
inheritors of 4000 years of architecture integrated by the
highest tradition of indigenous America and by one of the
deepest branches of Western architecture, our mission in
the future cannot forsake these precedents" (Figure 5).

The Unification of Modernism and Mexican Patrimony

In 1963, a year before the ratification of the Venice Charter,
architect Ricardo de Robina published an essay in which he
analyzed the development of modern architecture in Mexico
between 1938 and 1963.24 As some of his colleagues already
had done, he postulated that Mexican historic architecture ?
in both its aesthetic and material traditions ?had conferred a
distinctive aspect to Mexican modern architecture, different
from other national modern architectures. Mexican modern
architecture was, in de Robina's analysis, a local adaptation
of internacionalismo, the Spanish term for Henry-Russell Hitch
cock and Philip Johnson's International Style. However, he
noted that Mexican architecture was not entirely explicable
through the rubric postulated by Hitchcock and Johnson.25 De
Robina wrote: "Historic presence lets itself be felt today...
even when architecture that ignores traditional values is car
ried out, even then, it doesn't have a character of ignoring
these values, but of a struggle which is aware of them."26
De Robina later reiterates his theme, that modern Mexican
architecture maintained an indelible bond with its historic
roots: "The new [Mexican] architecture will be no exception
to [the historical constants] and will tend to form ?as one of
its basic assumptions ?an expressive and material bond
with the past."27
The completion of the La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in
1963 was physical testimony of this idea. The complex was
constructed as the heart of a development in Nonoalco
Tlatelolco, Mexico City, and named after Presidente Adolfo
Lopez Mateos. This major housing project was constructed
on a large parcel of land located to the north of the city's his
toric center; the lead architect, Mario Pani, was the most

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 I fi H BS tlffejte^? ? ?..;

I i e I ^ |1h ^

5 Secretarfa de Relaciones Exteriores

(Foreign Affairs Ministry), Tlatelolco,
Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, architect,
1965. From the magazine Arquitectura
Mexico 99 (1967): 187

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6. Ciudad Universitaria campus,
Mexico City, UNAM. Pedro Ramirez
Vazquez, 4000 ahos de arquitectura
Mexicana, 303.
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144
j -
AT
OFt
-wimpool
experienced architect in large-scale housing in Mexico.28
The size and the human density of Pani's architectural project
were huge, with nearly twelve thousand apartments housing
some seventy thousand people.29 Within this massive urban
and architectural conglomeration, the public space of the
Plaza de las Tres Culturas was conceived as the scheme's
symbolic heart, the most significant national work of arch
itecture in Mexico after the completion of the Ciudad Univer
sitaria in 1954 (Figure 6). The entire development serves
as testimony to the attitudes both toward new construction
and heritage held by Mexican architects of the modern
movement.
The Nonoalco-Tlatelolca tribe founded the city of Nonoalco
Tlatelolco in 1325. This city was the twin of nearby Mexico
Tenochtitlan. At the site, a pre-Hispanic pyramid stood at the
moment of the building of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas near
a church built by Franciscan missionaries in the sixteenth
century.30 Those two sites were protected by INAH's historic
monuments law, and Pani and the architectural team were
required to construct across from the archeological space.31
They brought the design well beyond this state with the deci
sion?made together with the political authorities?to place
the tower of the Foreign Affairs Ministry at the southern limit
of the complex. The commission for the tower was awarded to
68
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 Pedro Ramirez Vazquez,32 who had recently designed the
Museo Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, one of the
emblematic Mexican buildings of the second half of the cen
tury. The official publication placed the entire project in the
context of Mexico's historic patrimony: "special interest has
been assigned [to this dwelling] in addition to its significance
as one of the most important facilities for social benefit built
in a city of five million inhabitants, to its contribution to the
teaching of our history and to the spreading of our culture."33
The inauguration ceremony took place on the Plaza de las
Tres Culturas, which is an indicator with which to measure
within the value scale of the Mexican government?the impor
tance of the space that the Mexican architects had recently
transformed. The historic site was no longer a simple archaeo
logical monument once it had been integrated with new con
struction; instead, following the Mexican architectural theories
of the previous half-century, the archeological vestiges were
reinterpreted as critical roots of Mexican modern architecture.
Indeed, the culture of Mexican identity had consolidated by
this historical juncture: Mexicanness was conceived as the
sentimental?and, as such, also spiritual?relation to the
local past, understood as the social and historical events that
took place in the territory of the Mexican Republic. In this sense,
architects looked to the premodern past, but not in the man
ner, for example, of the Florentine Renaissance, when archi
tects directly copied the ruins of Rome. Rather, in Mexico,
there was an emphasis on abstraction enabled precisely by
the notion of a permanent national or Mexican architecture.
"Neo-viceregal" and "neo-indigenous" -isms should thus be
seen as formulas of "style," in the same manner in which they
were applied in the second half of the nineteenth century.34
The Plaza de la Tres Culturas is particularly noteworthy
as an example of this attitude. The urban project juxtaposed
architectures from three different historic periods?without
trying to find material equivalence between the modern build
ings and the historic monuments ?in order to conform an
abstract urban space containing physical cultural symbols
of preexisting architecture (Figure 7). Although the creation
of collective recreational space was a functional element of
the project, its main mission was to convey a wider cultural
message: that the past and the present of the country were
expressed at once within a new modern framework of national
identity.35 A reading of some of the concepts in the official
publications shows that this was a matter of deliberate intent,
especially when the design highlighted the relationships
between the new buildings and the archeological vestiges
they faced: "(in the plaza area) the restoration of the whole of

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 "fi

I1:

7. Plaza de las Tres Culturas (The the archeological site takes place, of which the main part is
Plaza of the Three Cultures). Conjunto
urbano, 219.
pre-Columbian pyramid ... El Templo de Santiago [Santiago
Temple]... [and] El Colegio de La Santa Cruz [The Holy Cros
College]... all of these works shall harmonize with the diff
ent buildings of contemporary architecture to be construct
in that section"36 (Figure 8).
To conclude, in 1963 and in an urban development larg
dictated by the orthodoxies of the modern movement, the
preservation of the vestiges of the past was not only the ob
of great concern but was also used to support the cultural

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 WIN

-
NK1- ~.L

8. Plaza dedoctrine
las of anTres
official "nationalCulturas
identity" policy by taking (The
Plaza of the Three Cultures). From
the
the old buildings
magazine
themselves as historic symbols, considered
Arquitectura Mexico
99 (1967): 188. apart from their architectural significance. The Mexican cul
ture of identity, whose origins can be traced to the early twen
tieth century, carried with it a high regard for the architectural
values of cultures of the past, as well as the need to guarantee
the preservation of the buildings wherever these values were
manifest. In arguing for these affinities, modernist architects
provided a continuum of history to Mexican architecture and a
successful appropriation of the past, which in turn gave way
to a model of architectural Mexicanness that continues to be
felt into the present.

Author Biography
Enrique X. de Anda Alams is an art historian at UNAM (National University of
Mexico) in Mexico City, and a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones
Esteticas at the same institution. He specializes in Mexican modern architecture
and the preservation of cultural heritage, and is responsible for the group of
twentieth-century specialists of ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments
and Sites) in Mexico and Latin America. He has published more than twenty
books on the history of modern architecture.

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 Endnotes
1. See Jesus T. Acevedo, Disertaciones de un arquitecto (Mexico: Biblioteca de
Autores Mexicanos, 1920).
2 On December 31,1938, the creation of the National Institute of Anthropology
(INAH) was decreed; on December 31,1945, the internal law of the National Insti
tute of Fine Arts (INBA) was approved. See volume 7 of Enciclopedia de Mexico
(Mexico City: Jose Rogelio Alvarez 1978).
3 See Enrique X. de Anda A., coordinator, Ciudad de Mexico: Arquitectura 1921-1970
(Sevilla: Junta de Andalucia, 2001).
4 See Enrique X. de Anda A., La Arquitectura de la Revolution Mexicana: Corrientes
yestilos en la decada de los Veinte, 2nd ed. (Mexico: UNAM, 2008).
5 The bibliography on Jose Vasconcelos is abundant; see Claude Fell, Jose Vascon
celos: Los ahos del aguila (Mexico: UNAM, 1989).
6 The National School of Architecture evolved from the Academy of Fine Arts of
San Carlos (1783); as a school it was and still is linked to the National University
of Mexico and became the School of Architecture in 1929.
7 Federico Mariscal y Pina. (1881-1971). The importance of Mariscal derives from
his having been a teacher of the history of architecture, a renowned constructor,
director of the National School of Architecture and president of the Mexican Archi
tects Association. See Diccionario Porrua (Mexico: Editorial Porrua, 1964), 2120.
8 Federico Mariscal, La patria y la arquitectura national (Mexico imprenta Stephan
Torres, 1915).
9 See, among other references: Enrique X. De Anda A., "La identidad nacionalista
del estilo neocolonial y su persistencia en la cultura mexicana moderna" (Nation
alistic identity of the neo-viceregal style and its persistence in Mexican modern
culture), in Una mirada a la arquitectura mexicana del sigloXX (Diez ensayos)
(Mexico: ONACULTA, 2005).
10 Jesus T. Acevedo, in his lectures ?starting in 1907?began proposing the
configuration of a new architectonic program with forms adopted from viceregal
architecture. Acevedo, Disertaciones de un arquitecto.
11 Mariscal, La patria y la arquitectura national, 10-11.
12 Ibid., 10.
13 Ibid., 11.
14 Ignacio Marquina, Memorias, 1st ed. (Mexico, INAH, 1964).
15 See Rafael Lopez Rangel, Enrique Ydhez en la cultura arquitectdnica mexicana
(Mexico: UAM Atzcapozalco, Editorial Limusa, 1989)
16 Gabriel Garcia Maroto, Arquitectura popular en Mexico (Mexico City: INBA,
1954). 5- Text and photographs by Gabriel Garcia Maroto.
171. E. Myers, Mexico's Modern Architecture (New York: Architectural Book Publish
ing Co., 1952), 266.
18 See the lecture by Jose Villagran G. in Panorama de 50 ahos de arquitectura con
tempordnea, (Mexico: INBA, 1952).
19 Garcia Maroto, Arquitectura popular en Mexico.
20 Ibid., 5.
21 Ibid., 9.
22 Ibid.
23 Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, 4000 anos de arquitectura mexicana (Mexico: Sociedad
de Arquitectos Mexicanos, Colegio Nacional de Arquitectos Mexicanos, 1956).
24 Ricardo de Robina, "25 anos de arquitectura mexicana, dialogo en torno a
su supuestos, sus logros y sus directivas, 1938-1963," Arquitectura Mexico 83
(Sept 1963).
25 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York:
W.W. Norton Company, 1932), 260.
26 Ricardo de Robina, "25 anos de arquitectura mexicana," emphasis added.
27 Ibid. One last quote has to do with the explanation he gave to color as a con
stant in Mexican architecture; he wrote that Modern Mexican architecture pre
serves chromatic values "in the same way as pre-Hispanic architecture was
exhaustively colorful, through the use of painted stucco, a tradition which was
carried on by the architecture of the convents of the sixteenth century [and that
was to be] changed in the eighteenth century to a severe polychromy with natural
materials"; it should be pointed out that de Robina also did archeological
research work on pre-Hispanic architecture.
28 Enrique X. de Anda A., La vivienda colectiva de la modernidad en Mexico: Los
multifamiliares durante el periodo presidential de Miguel Aleman (1946-1952)
(Mexico City: UNAM, 2008); Louise Noelle, ed., Mario Pani (Mexico City: UNAM,
2008).
29 Conjunto urbano "Presidente Lopez Mateos" (Nonoalco-Tlatelolco) (Mexico
City: Banco Nacional Hipotecario Urbano y de Obras Publicas, S.A., 1963).

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 30 The church of Santiago was built by order of Carlos V in 1543. The College of
Santa Cruz was built by order of the Viceroy of Mendoza in 1536 and was the first
college in America dedicated to the teaching of native noble men. See Diccionario
Porrua (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1964), 357.
31 The 1938 law of historical monuments protected the historical vestiges at the
moment of the architectonic intervention by the group lead by Mario Pani.
32 The construction of three Museums had been planned in the site of the "Plaza
of the Three Cultures." See Conjunto Urbano, 233.
33 Ibid., 215.
34 See Aracy Amaral et al., Arquitectura neocolonial en America latina: Caribe,
Estados Unidos, 1st ed. (Sao Paulo: Memorial Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1994),
336.
35 "National identity" is here understood as an abstract condition related to the
particular culture of a group in a country at a historical moment. It is interesting
to point out that the term is the collective "conscience" that?based on inherent
features ?a social group might have in orderto distinguish itself from others.
36 Conjunto Urbano, 233.

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