A
few years later, in another part of the city, Barragán became
involved with another subdivision. Backed by former President Alemán
and other powerful investors, the Satellite City was the project of
Mario Pani.24 Begun in 1954, this covered over 2,000 acres and was
intended to house some 200,000 people. It was obviously much less
exclusive than El Pedregal, but still decidedly middle class and
automotive in orientation. Fresh off his success at El Pedregal,
Barragán was invited to design a promotional symbol for the
project. He in turn invited his friend, the German émigré artist
Mathias Goeritz, to collaborate. The Towers of the Satellite City
were designed and built in 1957-1958.25
Drawing
on the Charter of Athens and on then-recent satellite projects in
Europe, Pani's Satellite City was one of many housing developments
built at that time to ease Mexico City's growing pains. It was
located alongside the city's main northbound highway, fourteen
kilometers northwest of the Zócalo. According to Pani, the
Satellite City when completed would be “absolutely
self-sufficient.... a truly autonomous urban entity.”26 Its various
sectors and super-blocks were carefully zoned to provide areas for
habitation, recreation, education, civic and commercial functions,
and parking and transportation. If these last took up a seemingly
disproportionate share of the development's space, Pani said it was
because this was “the epoch of the automobile,” and the Satellite
City was “a city of the epoch.” He called it “a truly modern
city... a city of the future, a city of tomorrow that we are
beginning to build today.”27 In all of this the project was
comparable to the University City, but if its functions were more
genuinely diverse, its architectural forms were notably more
homogeneous. According to one observer of the 1980s: Probably no
section of the capital seems less identifiably Mexican than the
endless sprawling neighborhoods of characterless middle-class homes
in Satellite City to the north. The zone is a monument both to the
middle-class Mexican's desire to own his home and to his fascination
with the American way of life. Beside the multi-lane highways are
huge shopping malls that are reachable only by car. The architecture
of most houses could be described as modern utilitarian, although
wealthier families have followed the American example of building
homes around the golf courses and private clubs. 28
The
towers designed by Barragán and Goeritz stand on a traffic island
at the development's southern edge, surrounded by twelve lanes of
blacktop. They are five in number and wedged-shaped, with their
sharpest angles pointing back toward the city center. Made of
reinforced concrete, hollow inside, they rise from a flat
concrete-paved plaza, from 34 to 54 meters high, but as
their site slopes downward toward the city, they might seem taller
when approached from the south. Originally they were to have been
much taller, as high as 200 to 300 meters, and accompanied by two
additional towers. One was to have been used as an observatory, the
others as water tanks. The ground was to be terraced and landscaped
with steps, lawns, and a fountain or reflecting pool; the design was
scaled back for economic reasons. According to the original scheme,
two were left neutral in color and three were painted with plastic
paints: one red, one yellow, one blue. Collectively they look like a
somewhat miniaturized skyscraper city, or a vastly over-sized model
of one, but either way they read as evident representations of
buildings rather than buildings themselves. They share this
aspect—the representation of modern urban architecture—with
O'Gorman's painted Ciudad de México, but there the comparison ends.
Where O'Gorman placed at the center of his painting a wide boulevard
filled with people and cars, the Towers of the Satellite City present
a peculiarly lifeless and abstract face. The space immediately around
them is almost always empty. They are a quiet and all-but
inaccessible center hemmed in by billboards and speeding cars, not a
distinct place so much as a sign or symbol of something beyond
themselves.
According
to Pani, the towers stood for “man's untamable urge to transcend to
great things...the spirit and the dignity of human works.”29
Goeritz called them a “plastic prayer.”30 More prosaically, they
were advertisements. At El Pedregal Barragán had demonstrated his
ability to turn otherwise undesirable land into valuable real estate
and this, along with his friendship with Alemán, seems to have been
the main reason for his having been invited to participate here. The
towers—unavoidable elements of verticality and dash in an otherwise
almost unrelentingly flat, monotonous landscape—beckoned would-be
exurbanites to come, to stop and to imagine the possibilities of life
in a newer, cleaner, safer, more exclusive “city outside the city.”
They were, in effect, advertisements for urban flight.
In
the chapter on "critical regionalism" in his book, Modern
Architecture: A Critical History, Kenneth Frampton illustrated the
work of Barragán with just one image: the Towers of the Satellite
City.31 One would be hard-pressed to find a less regionalistic, less
inherently Mexican design in Barragán's oeuvre. The towers grew
from earlier projects by Goeritz which were themselves inspired by
the medieval towers of San Gimignano, Italy, and by the modern ones
of Manhattan. Barragán contributed his fascination for the haunting
plazas of Italian painter Giorgio De Chirico, and his interest in
Corbusian tower blocks.32 At El Pedregal he had showcased the native
landscape; he echoed it there in the rambling, abstract, cubic forms
of the houses that he built on his own and with Max Cetto. Patios,
open-beamed ceilings, and rough stone walls referred discreetly to
the site and to Mexican architecture of the colonial past. None of
this sort of historical or geographical situating enters into the
Satellite City project. Its five faceless concrete towers could be
almost anywhere, anytime. What they evoke is not so much the dynamism
of the modern city but an obscure reminiscence of a city of the past,
or many cities, seen through the filter of memory and the flickering
of the mind's eye. They are, say, New York in the 1920s, when
Barragán saw it for the first time. They are the city left behind.
“Nostalgia,”
said Barragán, “is the poetic awareness of our personal past, and
since the artist's own past is the mainspring of his creative
potential, the architect must listen and heed his nostalgic
revelations."33 With the Towers of the Satellite City there is
no longer that sense of history—of specific shared experience, of
justified violence, hard work, and future promise—that fueled
O'Gorman's painting. There is instead a vague nostalgia: history with
all pain (save the poetic variety) removed; in other words, a kind of
forgetting, a flight from the tough truths of present and past, and a
failure to imagine—or a disinterest in engaging— the future.34
Approaching the towers from the south, seeing them in all of their
miniaturized mock urban splendor, one might not be amiss in thinking
of another towered structure of the 1950s: Snow White's palace at
Disneyland near Los Angeles. Both are castles in the air, icons of
escape from cities growing recklessly.
This
is an excerpt from the text "Settings for History and Oblivion
in Modern Mexico, 1942-58," by Keith L. Eggener in :
Jean-Francois Lejeune (ed.), Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and
Landscapes of Latin America, Princeton Architectural Press, New York
2003
Notes
25.
Trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, Pani was lead planner
at the University City, and designer of numerous prominent office
buildings, schools, city plans, hotels, and public housing projects.
See Louise Noelle Merles, “The Architecture and Urbanism of Mario
Pani,” in Edward Burian, pp. 177-89; and Mario Pani: la visión
urbana de la arquitectura (México D.F.: UNAM, 2000).
26. G. Nesbit,
“The Towers of Satellite City,” Arts and Architecture 75 (May
1958): 22-23; and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, “Luis Barragán:
Urban Design and Speculation,” in Federica Zanco, ed., Luis
Barragán: The Quiet Revolution, pp. 158-59, 252.
27.Mario
Pani, “México: Un Problema, Una Solución,” Arquitectura
México 60 (December 1957): 217.
28.Ibidem:
222, 225
29.
Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (New
York: Vintage Books, 1986), pp. 388-89.
30.Mario
Pani, “México: Un Problema, Una Solución”: 225.
31.Federico Morais,
Mathias Goeritz (México, D.F.: UNAM, 1982), p. 37.
32.Kenneth Frampton,
Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Thames and Hudson,
1992), pp. 318-20.
33.Luis
Barragán, "Cómo Deben Desarrollarse las Grandes Ciudades
Modernas: El Creciemiento de la C. de México," Zócolo no.
3,123 (12 Oct. 1959): sec. 4, p. 1. On his interest in De Chirico see
Eggener, pp. 77-81.
34.
Luis Barragán, “Barragán on Barragán”: 31.
