from, for, and of the Megacity

On July 4, 2000, our first night in Mexico City, a young Mexican architect who had studied real estate development in New York suggested we join him for sushi at a restaurant he had recently designed in the newly developed neighborhood of Santa Fe. Built on land that had been the city garbage dump, Santa Fe had been transformed by developers into an upper-class enclave traversed by freeways and strewn with office buildings which are virtually indistinguishable from those on the outskirts of Baltimore or Washington D.C. Our host said the restaurant was “close” to the city center where we were staying, but, without traffic, the drive took almost forty-five minutes. In a city of nearly 1700 sq km, close is a relative term. Once at the restaurant, seated on imported Italian furniture under high-tech halogen lighting, we dined on Japanese fish, drank tequila, and finished the meal with a traditional Mexican tres leches cake prepared by the proprietor’s grandmother. On our return trip, we passed a series of new housing developments and were struck not by the planned but by the unplanned developments. The hillsides, too steep for authorized construction, were jammed with informal housing. The ‘official’ residents of Santa Fe, distressed by the unsightly structures visible from the highways and their homes, had collected money to paint the exterior of the hillside houses in lively colors.

On that first night, we experienced many of the contrasts and confluences that would prove evident at nearly every moment in the city. Mexico City is both enormous and minuscule, ‘super’-fast and maddeningly slow, wealthy and impoverished, lush and barren, dense and sparse, global and local. Unlike Tokyo, London, Sydney or New York, Mexico City had not provided us with a ready-made iconographic image. At the end of our eight-day visit, we clearly understood why; the city resists reduction to an icon precisely because its single most distinguishing feature is the complex and radically heterogeneous mixture of components that define it.

With a population rapidly approaching twenty-five million, the ZMVM (Zona Metropolitana del Valle de Mexico)  distinguishes itself as the largest and fastest growing conurbation  in the western hemisphere. This size alone guarantees a mixture of cultures, classes, races, businesses, economies and even architectures that differentiate a provincial city from a cosmopolitan metropolis. Although restrained in size by the geography of the volcanic valley in which it sits, the city is incomprehensibly large. Taxicab drivers carry the 362 page Guia Roji city road map and consult it regularly. We found that many architects and even some taxi drivers were unfamiliar with areas and projects outside of the western half of the DF (District Federal).

Despite its size, the city remains a collection of distinct neighborhoods: some independent colonial or precolonial towns, such as Coyoac·n, were appropriated or absorbed as the city expanded; some simply infilled between existing areas; and some on the periphery, such as NezahualcÛyotl, grew rapidly and almost spontaneously. The explosion of growth that occurred within the last century has undermined attempts to plan the city’s growth and thus many areas have essentially maintained their distinct character while being incorporated into the city. Mexico City is not just a city of neighborhoods, it is a city of cities.

Nearly impossible to grasp as a physical entity, Mexico City stretches beyond the visible, a low, seemingly endless expanse of built landscape. We were told that a helicopter tour would afford us our only opportunity to grasp the structure of the city and the vastness of its footprint. But while this totalizing view provides a general reading of the city, it neglects the specificities of the urban environment from the walking scale, from the sidewalk and the street cafe. Perhaps because of the city’s vastness, most locals identify themselves as residents of a particular neighborhood or street, not of Mexico City. However, this micro-view presents an equally incomplete image of the city. In presenting the projects herein, we intentionally vacillate between these two understandings of the city - the scale of the project as well as its situation within and relationship to a neighborhood and to the city as a whole. 

In trying to capture a sense of the city and its architecture, we were keenly aware that any approach we employed would be inadequate. Architects and urbanists throughout history have devised various models and methods to describe the urban environment – from Leon Battista Alberti to the Situationists to the New Urbanists - but none of these provide a simultaneous reading of the city as an understandable whole and as collection of discrete but also coherent places or events within the larger framework. Striving to respond to Edward Soja’s appeal for research that combines both macro and micro-scale studies of the city, we decided to address Mexico City both from a general overall plan and also from a series specific architectural projects.

The journal focuses on eight distinct areas within the overall city plan, each of which contains one or more projects. The areas vary in size — at times representing a neighborhood, at times a delegation depending on how local boundaries are perceived. Condesa and Polanco are both small  districts with strong identities the center city, so despite their proximity, they were referred to as distinct areas. Rocha’s Centro Para Invidentes, on the other hand, is located simply in the larger delegation of Iztapalapa, whose rapid, unplanned development lacks the cohesion and distinct character of more central neighborhoods.

Locating the projects within a particular neighborhood facilitates an understanding of the reciprocal relationship between the project and its context. Isaac Broid’s Tamaulipas 54 and Higuera y S·nchez’s Veracruz projects are both new apartment buildings in the Condesa. However, each proposes a distinct urban gesture. S·nchez y Higuera’s interior courtyard and Broid’s curving facade can be read in relation to their larger context. Like the punctual interventions devised by Barcelona’s city planners, each of these projects creates an urban impact beyond its immediate surrounding.

As part of its particular context, each project is also related to the ecology of the city.  Alberto Kalach’s Lakes Project is perhaps the most extreme example, a proposal which defines its own new ecology by proposing the reintroduction of one of the city’s five original lakes, but  other projects also take design clues from their relationship to the landscape.  The design for the University City, for example, accommodated the existing layers of volcanic rock with stepped terraces which covered the site.  In some cases projects are developed as a reaction to catastrophic ecological situations in the ZMVM.  The development of Valle de Chalco emerged following the drainage of Lake Chalco, which left vast territories open to illegal settlement. The restoration of the Catedral Metropolitan also addressed an ecological disaster —the sinking of the city as the underground aquifer is drained to provide drinking water for the ever increasing population.   

The projects encompass a range of scales. Alberto Kalach’s Lakes project would cover over 32,500 acres, or nearly 1/10 of the city’s overall size. At the other extreme, in Luis Vicente Flores’s Rexo Bar a new glass wall and interior renovations to a 120 sq m space constitute the entire urban intervention. Regardless of their size or scope, each project engages the urban context through its design. Kalach’s scheme reconfigures an entire area of the city, defining new green spaces, development areas, recreational land, and a new airport. Flores’s bar engages and activates the street through a new glass facade that alternately screens and exposes the interior public spaces through translucent and transparent panels.

Having assembled this work into a single publication, we discovered again what we experienced on our first night in Mexico City: the conflation of seemingly contradictory conditions present not only in the work but also in the way this work is produced and conceived. Most of the projects are the product of what, in the United States, would be an impossible collaboration, or at least a non-traditional mode of architectural practice. Javier S·nchez and Waldo Higuera combine their respective experiences as architect/developer and engineer/contractor into a single office. Alberto Kalach has assembled a team of geologists, traffic specialists, landscape architects, hydrologists, drainage specialists, and numerous engineers to assist with the design of the Lakes Project, which has been in his office for six years. At Mauricio Rocha’s Centro para Invidentes, his governmental client dictated an accelerated schedule, specified construction methods, mandated the use of unskilled labor, and limited his construction observation, all of which affected the design and implementation. The architects we encountered in preparing this issue tended to see themselves as facilitators as well as designers, actively affecting the realization of their projects. 

Not unlike the self-built homes in the city’s informal developments whose roofs sprout re-bar antennae awaiting the next addition, each of these projects situates itself somewhere between the pragmatic and the utopian. In the Ciudad Universitaria, the city has a precedent for the possibility for building large-scale utopian projects. On a somewhat similar scale, the Lakes Project is emphatically explained as an inevitable solution to the catastrophic water, pollution and subsidence problems facing the city. The Centro para Invidentes, located adjacent to an industrial refuse area, surrounds itself with a large rock wall to buffer the noise and with a fragrant landscape that provides sensory clues to orient the blind. Even in smaller scale projects, such as the Enrique Norten’s Hotel Habita, the architects spoke of activating and affecting an area of the city. 

Every project herein was designed in relation to and consideration of Mexico City. By presenting “Projects from the Megacity” we have intentionally avoided an overarching or singular reading of the city. Instead we are presenting a series of moments, fragments that capture the diverse mosaic of the city as we experienced it. What these projects share is a relationship to the city; they are not only from the city but of the city and for the city.