The pavil­ion mea­sures 18 me­tres long by 4.8 me­tres high by 1.8 me­tres wide. It is made of enam­eled steel and vinyl-coated glass pan­els. The pavil­ion is at­tached to the fence which sep­a­rates the em­ployee and vis­i­tor park­ing lot from the truck yard of the fac­tory’s ship­ping de­part­ment. It has been sited to re­place a shel­ter hous­ing fac­tory work­ers’ bi­cy­cles.

Does ar­chi­tec­ture have to have a func­tion? Mex­i­can mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture was highly in­flu­enced by func­tion­al­ist think­ing at its out­set. A cen­tral fig­ure of this move­ment was Juan O’Gor­man, and his pub­lic school de­signs and first houses strictly ad­here to func­tion­al­ist doc­trine. In O’Gor­man’s early pro­jects, “The form was en­tirely de­rived from the

util­i­tar­ian func­tion. The ser­vices, both of elec­tric­ity and san­i­ta­tion, were ex­posed.”1 This was a vi­sion of an ar­chi­tec­ture caught up in the tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions of the en­gi­neer, and was at the heart of the prac­tices of many Mex­i­can ar­chi­tects from the 1930’s through the ’50’s, many ar­chi­tects of the pe­riod re­ceiv­ing their train­ing from the tra­di­tional seat of en­gi­neer­ing—the Mex­ico City Poly­tech­nic. The ar­chi­tect Max L. Cetto summed up the pre­vail­ing mood with his man­i­festo-like state­ment, “There is no such thing as ar­chi­tec­ture with­out util­ity to hu­man be­ings.”2

In con­trast, we find the 1920’s and ’30’s dis­play works of Mies van der Rohe in which the non-func­tional

as­pect of dis­play struc­tures al­lowed the ar­chi­tect free­dom to ad­dress the for­mal, per­cep­tual and “spir­i­tual” prob­lems of ar­chi­tec­ture. About Mies’ ex­hi­bi­tion struc­tures, Wal­lis Miller writes “This em­pha­sis on per­cep­tion, along with Mies’ gen­eral pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the “spirit of the time,” wrested at­ten­tion away from func­tion.”3  Later, in the United States, when new build­ing tech­nol­ogy be­came avail­able Mies’ dis­play works, with their at­ten­tion to for­mal and per­cep­tual con­cerns led to tech­nol­ogy and func­tion-based works like the Illi­nois In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy cam­pus in Chicago. This cam­pus di­rectly in­spired the de­sign of the Mex­ico City Poly­tech­nic, by Reinaldo Pérez Rayón. But iron­i­cally, ac­cord­ing to Al­berto Pérez-Gómez, in a throw­back to Mies’ early con­cern for form, the de­sign of the Poly­tech­nic

was a purely for­mal ex­er­cise: “While at IIT there is a kind of ra­tio­nal­iza­tion that has to do with the in­dus­trial base of the United States, in Mex­ico it be­comes a for­mal de­vice that is then car­ried out with con­ven­tional crafts­man­ship… So there is a kind of con­tra­dic­tion where the con­nec­tion with Mies be­comes purely for­mal rather than re­lated to the means of pro­duc­tion, which was the in­ter­est of Mies at the time he de­signed IIT.”4 For­mal­ism comes full cir­cle and lands in the midst of Mex­ico’s func­tion­al­ists.

The de­sign of the Pa­bellón de bi­ci­cle­tas in­dulges in the free­dom af­forded by Mies’ non-func­tional con­cept of dis­play struc­tures. The re­sult is an ar­chi­tec­tural folly: a struc­ture im­pos­si­bly nar­row and shrouded in mys­te­ri­ous pur­pose. Yet this struc­ture

of du­bi­ous func­tion seems to be made up of func­tion­al­ist sig­ni­fiers: in­ex­pen­sive in­dus­trial metal fram­ing and floor­ing, ex­posed con­crete foot­ings, stan­dard­ized glass pan­els. The pavil­ion seems to grow out of the fac­tory’s stan­dard gray metal fenc­ing which sup­ports it.

Even the colours em­ployed in the pavil­ion are de­rived from func­tion­al­ist ren­der­ings, them­selves based on the con­struc­tivist colour schemes of van Does­burg and Mo­holy Nagy. The colour-con­trasted ex­te­rior/in­te­rior of func­tion­al­ist ax­ono­met­rics and per­spec­tives in­spire the white ex­te­rior and tomato-red in­te­rior of the pavil­ion.

In the same way the Mex­ico City Poly­tech­nic was de­signed to mim­ick a late-Miesian func­tion­al­ism, the Pa­bellón de bi­ci­cle­tas tries to “look func­tion­al­ist.” But this func­tion­al­ist ve­neer also points to the “ul­te­rior mo­tive” of the pavil­ion: the stor­age of bi­cy­cles. The pavil­ion is on the site of a daily pil­grim­age by fac­tory work­ers ar­riv­ing by bi­cy­cle, caus­ing them to in­ter­act with the piece in a strictly util­i­tar­ian man­ner. This func­tion has been ab­sorbed by the pavil­ion al­most by de­fault, oc­cu­py­ing as it does the site of the orig­i­nal bi­cy­cle shed. This hy­brid struc­ture seems to vi­brate with the ten­sion be­tween func­tion and dis­play. It com­bines and con­trasts them in a way which in­vites fur­ther con­tem­pla­tion of these prob­lems, cen­tral to the dis­play of both ar­chi­tec­ture and art.