flight

The Centro and other inner-city neighborhoods began loosing population in the early fifties. This phenomenon heightened in the seventies, and turned into a full-fledged exodus after the earthquake. But the first major blow to population dynamics of the Centro came with the disbanding of the National University and its transfer to the spanking new modernist campus in the southernmost part of the city. For years, the university schools and faculties were scattered around downtown, housed in grand buildings, and the Centro owed its fizz to youngsters and intellectual types. They filled the cafés de chinos and the pensiones and the used book stores and the after-school dancehalls and other temples of bohemia.

The new campus was proclaimed a great architectural feat, a symptom of Mexico striding bravely towards modernity. The master plan for the campus was drawn up by Mario Pani, who would therein become the architectural sweetheart of the Mexican developmentalist regime. In what many art and architectural historians praise as a unique contribution of postrevolutionary aesthetic production in Mexico, the UNAM is the apogee of “plastic integration”. This is basically a reference to comprehensive oeuvres that merge architecture, painting and sculpture in a “unified work of art.” The true virtue of the UNAM, though, is more a political integration (and neutralization) behind the aesthetic mélange: the political incorrectness of Siqueiros (diluted), Diego Rivera’s socialist nativism (also softened), the peyote inspired visions of the old-age O’Gorman, Vladimir Kaspé’s scrupulous rationalism, the aggressive mexicanismo of Federico Eppens, Goeritz quietist abstractions… all put together in one, like a big happy (albeit dysfunctional) family. More than plastic integration, the UNAM was a product of forced cohabitation, under the premise of national reconciliation in times of acute political upheaval, the “constructive” phase of the Revolution (the profit-driven phase, that is), etc.

From a critical standpoint, the transfer of the UNAM, more than a “rational” urban strategy or a gesture of modernist architectural purism, was a political move. The Centro had historically been a sight of political ferment. After WW2, Mexico was caught in the whirlwind of Cold War politics, and students were the target of officialist suspicions and repression, along with the syndicates and popular sectors that typically led massive demonstrations and protests through the streets of the Centro, and took the vast surface of the Zócalo, the central square, to show their strength. These are the years when Mexico matured in terms of modern architecture, but also the years that the country refined its authoritarian state system.