Mexico City became one of the centers of architectural modernism in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Invigorated by insights drawn from the first published histories of Mexican colonial architecture, which suggested that Mexico possessed a distinctive architecture and culture, beginning in the 1920s a new generation of architects created profoundly visual modern buildings intended to convey Mexico's unique cultural character. By midcentury these architects and their students had rewritten the country's architectural history and transformed the capital into a metropolis where new buildings that evoked pre-conquest, colonial, and International Style architecture coexisted. Through an exploration of schools, a university campus, a government ministry, a workers' park, and houses for Diego Rivera and Luis Barragan, Kathryn O'Rourke offers a new interpretation of modern architecture in the Mexican capital, showing close links between design, evolving understandings of national architectural history, folk art, and social reform. This book demonstrates why creating a distinctively Mexican architecture captivated architects whose work was formally dissimilar, and how that concern became central to the profession.

The states of Northern Mexico—Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Durango, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja California Norte and Sur—have architecture, urbanism, and landscape design that offer numerous lessons in how to build well, but this constructed environment is largely undervalued or unknown. To make this architecture better known to a wide professional, academic, and public audience, this book presents the first comprehensive overview in either English or Spanish of the architecture, urban landscapes, and cities of Northern Mexico from the country’s emergence as a modern nation in 1821 to the present day. Profusely illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs, maps, and analytical drawings of urban cores of major cities, The Architecture and Cities of Northern Mexico systematically examines significant works of architecture in large cities and small towns in each state, from the earliest buildings in the urban core to the newest at the periphery. Edward R. Burian describes the most memorable works of architecture in each city in greater detail in terms of their spatial organization, materials, and sensory experience. He also includes a concise geographical and historical summary of the region that provides a useful background for the discussions of the works of architecture. Burian concludes the book with a brief commentary on lessons learned and possible futures for the architectural culture of the region, as well as the first comprehensive biographical listing of the architects practicing in Northern Mexico during the past two centuries.

In 1968, Mexico prepared to host the Olympic games amid growing civil unrest. The spectacular sports facilities and urban redevelopment projects built by the government in Mexico City mirrored the country’s rapid but uneven modernization. In the same year, a street-savvy democratization movement led by students emerged in the city. Throughout the summer, the ‘68 Movement staged protests underscoring a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement. Just ten days before the Olympics began, nearly three hundred student protestors were massacred by the military in a plaza at the core of a new public housing complex. In spite of institutional denial and censorship, the 1968 massacre remains a touchstone in contemporary Mexican culture thanks to the public memory work of survivors and Mexico’s leftist intelligentsia. In this highly original study of the afterlives of the ’68 Movement, George F. Flaherty explores how urban spaces—material but also literary, photographic, and cinematic—became an archive of 1968, providing a framework for de facto modes of justice for years to come.

Radical Functionalism: A Social Architecture for Mexico provides a complex and nuanced understanding of the functionalist architecture developed in Mexico during the 1930s. It carefully re-reads the central texts and projects of its main advocates to show how their theories responded to the socially and culturally charged Mexican context. These, such as architects Juan Legarreta, Juan O’Gorman, the Union of Socialist Architects, and Manuel Amábilis, were part of broader explorations to develop a modern, national architecture intended to address the needs of the Mexican working classes. Through their refunctioning of functionalism, these radical thinkers showed how architecture could stand at the precipice of Mexico's impending modernization and respond to its impending changes. The book examines their engagement and negotiation with foreign influences, issues of gender and class, and the separation between art and architecture. Functionalist practices are presented as contradictory and experimental, as challenging the role of architecture in the transformation of society, and as intimately linked to art and local culture in the development of new forms of architecture for Mexico, including the "vernacularization" of functionalism itself. Uniquely including translations of two manifesto-like texts by O’Gorman expressing the polemical nature of their investigations, Radical Functionalism: A Social Architecture for Mexico will be a useful reference for scholars, researchers and students interested in the history of architectural movements.

La presente Versión 2000 es una nueva edición de la Historia general de México, preparada por el Centro de Estudios Históricos de El Colegio de México. En esta ocasión se incorporan, por primera vez desde la aparición original de la obra en 1976, varios cambios importantes, entre los que destacan la sustitución de algunos capítulos y la revisión y actualización de otros. Los capítulos sustituidos o renovados profundamente incluyen una amplia variedad de temas: las regiones de México, la prehistoria, el mundo mexica, el siglo XVI, el siglo XVIII, las primeras décadas del México independiente, la cultura mexicana del siglo XIX y la política y economía del México contemporáneo. Los capitulos correspondientes a estas temáticas han sido reescritos o modificados por autores que figuraban ya en la edición original: Bernardo García Martínez, José Luis Lorenzo, Pedro Carrasco, Enrique Florescano, Josefina Z. Vázquez, José Luis Martínez y Lorenzo Meyer.

The first major work in English on Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990), this book illuminates the artist's pivotal role within the landscape of twentieth-century modernism. Goeritz became recognized as an abstract sculptor after arriving in Mexico from Germany by way of Spain in 1949. His call to integrate abstract forms into civic and religious architecture, outlined in his "Emotional Architecture" manifesto, had a transformative impact on midcentury Mexican art and design. While best known for the experimental museum El Eco and his collaborations with the architect Luis Barrag n, including the brightly colored towers of Satellite City, Goeritz also shaped the Bauhaus-inspired curriculum at Guadalajara's School of Architecture and the iconic Cultural Program of Mexico City's 1968 Olympic Games. Josten addresses the Cold War implications of these and other initiatives that pitted Goeritz, an advocate of internationalist abstraction, against Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, ardent defenders of the realist style that prevailed in official Mexican art during the postrevolutionary period. Exploring Goeritz's dialogues with leading figures among the Parisian and New York avant-gardes, such as Yves Klein and Philip Johnson, Josten shows how Goeritz's approach to modernism, which was highly attuned to politics and place, formed part of a global enterprise.

This innovative history argues that we can understand important facets of the Mexican Revolution by analyzing the architecture designed and built in Mexico City during the formative years from 1920 to 1940. These artifacts allow us to trace and understand the path of the consolidation of the Mexican Revolution. Each individual building or development, by providing indelible evidence of the process by which the revolution evolved into a government, offers important insights into Mexican history. Seen in aggregate, they reveal an ongoing urban process at work; seen as a "composition," they reveal changes over time in societal values and aspirations and in the direction of the revolution. This book focuses on structure, change, and process for this remarkable city "in the true image of the gigantic heaven." The changes described in Fuentes' narrative are man-made, not wrought by impersonal or natural forces except on the rare occasions of earthquake and flood. Patrice Elizabeth Olsen views Mexico City as an artifact of those who created it—representing their ardor, humanity, and religion, as well as their politics. Individual chapters detail the expression of revolutionary values and aims in the physical form of Mexico City's built environment between 1920 and 1940, examining direction and meaning in terms of who is given license to design and build structures in the capital city, and equally important, who is excluded. Through the reshaping of the capital the revolution was extended and institutionalized; physical traces of the process of negotiation that enabled the revolution to be "fixed" in the Mexican polity appear in the city's skyline, parks, housing developments, and other new construction, as well as in modifications to existing colonial-era buildings. In this manner, the author argues, Mexico City's urban form crystallized as a product of the revolution as well as a part of the revolutionary process, as it has been of other conquests throughout its history.

Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories has thirteen new essays from a range of distinguished architectural historians to help you understand the region’s rich and varied architecture. It will also introduce you to major projects that have not been written about in English. A foreword by historian Kenneth Frampton sets the stage for essays on well-known architects, such as Lucio Costa and Félix Candela, which will show you unfamiliar aspects of their work, and for essays on the work of little-known figures, such as Uruguayan architect Carlos Gómez Gavazzo and Peruvian architect and politician Fernando Belaúnde Terry. Covering urban and territorial histories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with detailed building analyses, this book is your best source for historical and critical essays on a sampling of Latin America's diverse architecture, providing much-needed information on key case studies. Contributors include Noemí Adagio, Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Luis Castañeda, Viviana d’Auria, George F. Flaherty, María González Pendás, Cristina López Uribe, Hugo Mondragón López, Jorge Nudelman Blejwas, Hugo Palmarola Sagredo, Gaia Piccarolo, Claudia Shmidt, Daniel Talesnik, and Paulo Tavares.

Providing over 200 entries on politics, government, economics, society, culture, and much more, this two-volume work brings modern Mexico to life. Viva Mexico! Border sharer. Major trade partner. Exporter of culture and citizens. Tourist destination. Mexico has always been of the utmost significance to the United States, with the shared 2,000-mile border, historical ties in mutual territory, and history of Mexican labor coming north and American tourists heading south. Fresh, current information on Mexico, the North American hotspot and gateway to Latin America, is always in demand by students and general readers and travelers. This is the best ready-reference on the crucial topics that define Mexico today. More than 200 essay entries provide quick, authoritative insight into the Mexican politics and government, society, institutions, events, culture, economy, people, issues, environment, and states and places. Written mostly by Mexicans and Mexican Americans, this set gives an accurate and wide view of the United States's dynamic southern neighbor. Each entry has further reading suggestions; a chronology, selected bibliography, and photographs complement the text.