Ter­ence Gower

 

The units which make up Tlatelol­cona are mod­eled on the blocks of flats of the Tlatelolco hous­ing com­plex, and I in­tend them to be arranged on the floor like a large-scale ar­chi­tec­tural ma­que­tte (see il­lus­tra­tion). With this work I of­fer the viewer the pos­si­bil­ity of re­con­fig­ur­ing Tlatelolco or ex­pand­ing it end­lessly in a reen­act­ment of pe­riod ex­per­i­ments in uni­ver­sal, mod­u­lar hous­ing.

 

The Tlatelolco com­plex is strik­ing for its scale and for the graphic beauty of its orig­i­nal façade de­signs. When it was built, Tlatelolco seemed closer to the vast fac­tory-pro­duced pub­lic hous­ing com­plexes of East­ern

Eu­rope than the mod­ern Pro­jects of North Amer­ica. Its un­usual scale prompted one Eu­ro­pean ar­chi­tec­ture mag­a­zine to re­ject pub­li­ca­tion of the pro­ject with the re­tort, “We don’t pub­lish ma­que­ttes.” In other words, the ed­i­tors failed to un­der­stand that they were look­ing at a pho­to­graph of a built pro­ject and not a model.

 

As prin­ci­pal ar­chi­tect, Mario Pani was re­spon­si­ble for both the el­e­gant de­tail­ing of the panel fa­cades (now lost un­der post-1985 but­tress­ing) and for the com­plex’s vast scale. Go­ing con­trary to con­tem­po­rary prac­tice, Pani as­tounded lo­cal gov­ern­ment by in­cor­po­rat­ing more units and green-space than re­quested, for the same in­vest­ment. The re­sult was a small city of clean, ef­fi­cient

dwellings that im­me­di­ately—though briefly—be­came a sym­bol of benev­o­lent gov­ern­ment ac­tion.

 

As all Mex­i­cans know, the sym­bol­ism of Tlatelolco was quickly re­versed by the gov­ern­ment-spon­sored mas­sacre of 1968. This was fol­lowed by the col­lapse of sev­eral  build­ings in the 1985 Mex­ico City earth­quake, due to sub­stan­dard con­struc­tion and cor­rup­tion in the build­ing trades.

 

There are con­flict­ing opin­ions on the so­cial im­pli­ca­tions of hous­ing built on this scale. Is Tlatelolco too large to pro­mote any sense of com­mu­nity? Or should it have been made even larger, in keep­ing with the vast scale pro­posed by the ar­chi­tect?

My art edi­tion Tlatelol­cona (tr: gi­ant Tlatelolco) com­mu­ni­cates the ex­cite­ment of Mario Pani’s first vi­sion of a hous­ing so­lu­tion for Mex­ico City; the mod­ern ar­chi­tect’s dream of or­der out of chaos. It com­mu­ni­cates the utopian ex­hil­a­ra­tion of large-scale plan­ning while at the same time it re­duces ur­ban plan­ning to some­thing akin to a child’s game of build­ing blocks. And fi­nally, the work pays homage to Mario Pani’s orig­i­nal façade de­signs by repack­ag­ing his com­po­si­tions as a fine art edi­tion.

Text: Tlatelol­cona⤓