USFDFTacTics of appropriaTionsanTa fe Housing uniT

USFDFTacTics of appropriaTion

onnis Luque

USFDFTacTics of appropriaTionsanTa fe Housing uniT

onnis LuquepHoTograpHY

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TeXTs BYpeter Kriegerchrist ian von Wisselpablo Landa rui loba

Pablo Landa Ruiloba

Este libro se realizó con apoyo del Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes a través del Programa Fomento a Proyectos y Coinversiones Culturales XXVII emisión 2011.

1957

In 1958 construction was concluded in the Santa Fe housing estate and

state workers and their families were moving in into what was perceived

as the flagship development of the national housing programme under

the auspices of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS). The previ-

ous years, the site next to the historic Camino Real to Santa Fe had seen

its transformation from an overgrown hillside location into a brand new

neighbourhood of a city embracing the promises of modernisation and

set on the path of massive expansion. Under the hands of Le Corbusier

disciple Mario Pani, a leading architect and urban planner of his time in

Mexico, the unidad habitacional Santa Fe was conceived as a model city

for contented urban living. 60 years on, this vision can be said to have

come true, even though the places and spatial organisation of life inside

and around the estate have profoundly been transformed.

Built as the city’s pioneering toehold beyond the limits of the then urban

fabric, today the Santa Fe housing estate appears as an island of con-

tained serenity and persisting order within the ever-changing sea of this

hyper-agglomeration which we refer to as Mexico city. Yet this is only

one side of the estates ‘reality’. The other is that of a built and inhabited

collage of individual desires and worries, a socio-material artwork con-

stantly shaped and reshaped by the practices of everyday life with their

inherent possibilities of (re)appropriation and (re)combination (de Cer-

teau 1988). Houses are constantly being adapted to changing needs and

public space is subject to the continuous negotiation of often contrary

claims regarding their ownership and best usage. Under the hands of the I N T R O D U C T I O N

inhabitants – either in resistance or as expansion to what the hands of the architect

had moulded – the estate’s relative solidity when seen in the broader urban context

gives way to the micro-process of change. In this sense, the unidad habitacional

Santa Fe is a model city for urban living too – the ideal place to study the poetic, the

world-making ways of navigating the everyday by which lived-in, material space is

socially produced (ibid 1988; Lefebvre 2009).

This making and remaking of place, set against the backdrop of Mexico city’s as

well as of genuine urban processes and phenomena, is the essence captured in On-

nis Luque’s USF-DF. Combining the virtues of both art photography and investiga-

tive photojournalism, Luque’s images suggest the aesthetic potentials of the prin-

ciples of bricolage as much as they reveal the ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ of place (Soja

2009). They invite us to both appreciate and challenge the everyday manifestations

of how “the spatial shapes the social as much as the social shapes the spatial” (ibid

2009:3). The images compiled in this book connect and refract, evoke and unpack

the creative tensions between everyday life and model living. They have the cour-

age to complicate the story (cf. Mauad and Rouverol 2004), to ask questions rather

then foreclose answers when taking us out into the open where the tactics of ap-

propriation (re)negotiate the forms and functions of an iconic modernist housing

development.

In the brief discussion accompanying Luque’s visual investigation, the anthropolo-

gist Pablo Landa takes on this shifting ground between agency and architecture, be-

tween lived and conceived space (Lefebvre 2009:33ff). He is joined by art historian

Peter Krieger who points us to the modes and powers of perception and (visual) in-

tervention by which the urban dweller makes this complex system a constituent part

of her/his identity. Both their writings engage critically with the people and places,

positions and perspectives that look in on us through Luque’s camera now that we

are looking at the pictures (cf. Back 2007:104). Being himself a resident of the Santa

Fe housing estate, Onnis Luque is opening this window to let his neighbours, friends

and relatives tell us their stories about such commonplace yet remarkable activities

as ‘working things out’, ‘making ends meet’ and ‘getting around’. We learn about

add-on spaces and pop-up times and are invited to follow ad-hoc routes that locals

take to see what comes next (cf. Simone 2004). Following Luque through an array

of additional staircases, extra floor levels, transformed balconies, floating awnings

and outreaching porticos we can ‘listen with the eyes’ (Back 2007) to how space is

put to work and expression carved out of action.

Hence, when seen in the context of urban studies, Luque’s photos and photograph-

ing practice constitute a rich visual method for social research. If we appreciate

complexity, uncertainty and surprise as highly significant ingredients of urban life

(Pieterse 2008:5), than Luque’s images acquire additional value precisely because

they encourage multiple interpretations both during and after the research process

(cf. Pink 2007). They trace the sedimentation of the many stories that constitute

the city (cf. Simone 2004:11) and challenge us to draw connections between these

intimate expressions and the (seemingly) remote historical and social transforma-

tions in which they are set (Mills 2000; Knowles and Sweetman 2004:8).

For example, the broad variety of aesthetic interventions to the modernist archi-

tecture resemble what could be coined a copy-past culture and the cult of ‘neo-’,

materializing in ever-new Greek, baroque and early modernist citations by which the

‘building self’ inscribes her/himself into the post-modern canon that we dispose of

for the construction of both our identity and our urban imaginaries. Likewise, the

collecting, sampling and curating of life itself appear before our eyes as

soon as we are invited to step inside Luque’s own and his neighbours’

homes. Witnessing the force of stay in the roots of a tree exploding a

bench or the power of persuasion of a young couple spending a day out

in the sun, we sense how different agents and forces compete with each

other in the transformation and persistence of the built environment.

Who is adapting to whom, we ask wandering from image to image: na-

ture to planning or planning to nature; people to architecture or architec-

ture to people; space to its use or usage to the space provided/claimed?

Everywhere we look, creative tensions arise between project and impro-

visation when the inhabitants of the unidad habitacional Santa Fe use

their own lives and the spaces they live in as both resources and arena for

their tactics of appropriation. Onnis Luque captures these tensions with

sharp attention and skilful art. His images give testimony of the trans-

formative and interpretative powers of those urban inventions grown by

adaptation and resistance. As Peter Krieger frames it, they invite us to

critically examine this as much as our own urban habitat with eyes open

to ‘the other beauty’ of everyday inhabitability.

B i B l i o g ra phyBack, Les. 2007. The Art of Listening. English ed. Oxford; New York: Berg.

de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. [French original: 1980]. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Knowles, Caroline, and Paul Sweetman, eds. 2004. Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual

Methods and the Sociological Imagination. New York NY: Routledge.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2009. The Production of Space. [27. English edition, French original 1974].

Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell.

Mauad, Ana Maria, and Alicia J. Rouverol. 2004. ‘Telling the Story of Linda Lord through

Photographs’. Pp. 178–192 in Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual Methods and the So-

ciological Imagination, edited by Caroline Knowles and Paul Sweetman. New York NY:

Routledge.

Mills, C. Wright. 2000. The Sociological Imagination. [first ed. 1959]. Oxford [England];New

York: Oxford University Press.

Pieterse, Edgar. 2008. City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development. Lon-

don: Zed Book.

Pink, Sarah. 2007. Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media, and Representation in Re-

search. 2nd ed. [first edition 2001]. London; Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. For the City yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities.

Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Soja, Edward. 2009. ‘The City and Spatial Justice’. Justice spatiale: Spatial Justice (online)

1(1). Retrieved May 24, 2011 (http://www.jssj.org/archives/01/05.php).

Onnis Luque’s photographic narrative on the transformation of a well-

known modernist-functionalist housing unit in Mexico City, half a century

after its construction, is not a neutral document, but a visual construction

from a subjective perspective, where we can appreciate the aesthetic val-

ue of everyday life in an emblematic and paradigmatic habitat. This collec-

tion of images is not in itself a record of the metamorphosis of a housing

estate, but rather something that lends itself to multiple readings—which

vary depending on the interests and intellectual capabilities of its view-

ers—on the permanent reconfiguration of a defining urban-architectural

pattern implemented in rapidly-growing Mexico City during the moderniz-

ing phase that took place in the 1950s. Despite the support for the under-

standing of this phenomenon in historical, anthropological and aesthetical

reflections found in this and other texts in this volume, the selected imag-

es do not offer final answers on this phenomenon. Rather, they stimulate

it: ¿how is it possible that a sharp, brilliant spatial-architectural structure,

can become a visual ensemble of great complexity and profound contra-

dictions? ¿What are the forces of socio-spatial reconfiguration whose re-

sults are captured by Luque in his revealing shots? Even amidst the flood

of images that circulate on our screens and printed materials, these pho-

tographs break with a visual routine and elicit reflections; they help us re-

invent the mutant visual construction—and thus the controversial spatial

identifications—of life in Latin American megalopolis. It is worth mention-

ing that even for a Eurocentric or North American public, the reading of

this visual discourse offers unexpected opportunities for introspection,

Modernity’s MetamorphosisImages of the Santa Fe Housing Unit in the Mexican Megalopolis

P E T E R K R I E G E RInstitutodeInvestigacionesEstéticas,UNAM

from which emerge truly “post” (and not “neo”-colonial) models that help

understand the urban autopoeisis of the 21th century.

Onnis Luque, both an architect and a photographer, takes advantage of

the license given by creative subjectivity to stimulate attention on the

unpredictable interaction between urban elements and socio-cultural

practices: he portrays perceived surroundings as the invention of an-

other beauty that goes beyond what is planned. In order to understand

to epistemological potential of the photographs presented in this book I

consider, first, the integration of the artist to his context and the topos of

his visual investigation. Second, I consider some conceptual aspects per-

taining the contradictions that exist in the Santa Fe Housing Unit. Third, I

reflect on the ways in which Luque’s visual narrative is configured.

i n t e g ra t i o n

The presence of portraits of the Santa Fe Housing Unit’s inhabitants in the

visual discourse signals the photographer’s deliberate approximation to

his object of study. The images do not only show the original structures

and their modifications, but also present the authors of their transforma-

tions. Shown in fixed poses, as if they were petrified or were monuments

to their own professional and personal lives, the selected neighbors rep-

resent the succession of the three generations that live in the housing

estate. Luque is part of this rooted social construction: his grandparents

were part of the initial settlers, who were followed by his parents; he,

too, chose to live in this place. For this reason, the portraits, some of

which were shot in private spaces—in living rooms crowded with furni-

ture and kitsch objects, or in stores filled to the top with junk food—are

not characterized by the social obscenity of classist cynicism of many

photographers with similar projects; rather, they reveal that behind the

insecure gaze of those represented, there is pride in living where they do.

Further, Onnis Luque witnessed the drastic changes that came with

the privatization of the housing estate, which took place in 1982, when

the Mexican Social Security Institute abandoned its earlier urban-social

commitment and transferred ownership of the complex to individuals

and an administrative trust. This was a watershed that led to the anar-

chic reconfiguration of the housing unit. Before this, the complex had

already experienced some transformations. Large families did not fit in

the tight apartments, and there were attempts at extending and chang-

ing the functions of assigned spaces. However, during the early period

the state’s order prevailed, and at least in part, the large common spaces

and green areas compensated for the overcrowded interiors. This order

collapsed with privatization, when many neighbors illegally occupied and

walled public spaces. At this moment, individual architectural expression

blossomed: families built new stories over the original houses, they built

neo-classical porticoes, balustrades and other kitsch ornaments, they

placed shiny aluminum doors and barbed wire, pained their property in

bright colors, improvised new roofs and expanded balconies, among oth-

er actions to reclaim more property for their own and change the habi-

tat’s aesthetic patterns.

This “referendum” against rigorous and pure modern architecture, which

Luque observed over the past decades, is the main theme of his photo-

graphic series on the Santa Fe Housing Unit. His training as an architect

(at the UNAM) offered him valuable insights on the aesthetic education

of the masses through images of neo-historical interiors in soap operas,

and on the supply of ornament in the construction market. The meta-

morphosis of an austere modern house into an opulent chalet reveals

how the production of architectural needs takes place well beyond the

aesthetic will of architects. What Luque documents is the autonomy and

anarchy of the architectural habitus, without emitting value judgments

and with high-quality photography.

No doubt, beyond aesthetic issues, structural and territorial issues are wor-

rying: the housing unit’s living space was doubled, large parts of its public

gardens disappeared, cars invaded sidewalks massively (some of them ac-

tually function as automobile cemeteries), and graffiti proliferated (grafitti

is no doubt an interesting indicator of crisis in deteriorated spaces in mega-

lopolis). These changes are layers and sediments of a new stage in the his-

tory of the Santa Fe Housing Unit, which not only put into question the pu-

rity of modern architecture, but also generate a different notion of “home,”

that is, of the symbolic relation with a place. For Luque and his generation,

this absurd collage of architectural-ornamental elements is normality; it is

the visual standard of large parts of the Mexican megalopolis.

These images nourish the self-understanding of a young “chilango” gen-

eration that celebrates the cultural and environmental decomposition of

its habitat as an aesthetic game with no fixed rules. The patchwork that

emerges, when, for example, the owner of an apartment decides to paint

the part of a building’s façade that corresponds to his property, is not

seen as a sign of the erosion of the communitarian spirit, but rather as a

playful event, omnipresent in Mexico City’s urban image. This attitude is

probably seen as a form of liberation in face of an authoritarian state and

its architectural imprint, designed and implemented during the nineteen-

fifties by one of the most notable architects of the political establish-

ment: Mario Pani, author of Santa Fe. In this way, the inhabitants of this

island of modernist happiness renegotiated the rules of aesthetic and

ethical respect. As a witness and actor, Luque records these changes

with his camera.

ConC e p t ua l i z a t i o n

However, not many people today perceive and understand this metamor-

phosis of urban image. Even when the megalopolis’ “chaos” becoame

one of the favorite topics of neo-conceptual Mexican art at the dawn of

the 21th century, and functionalist housing units—in their current de-

generated state—served as the symbolic sets new cinema in the country

since the nineteen-nineties, there has not been a deeper reflection on

the aesthetic status of the urban object. The visual sensibility of the av-

erage inhabitant of the megacity is similar to the capacity of the lizard

that operates in a close sensorial system. From this emerges one of the

didactic stimuli in Luque’s photography: in his work he reveals the ironic

tensions of a place and converts them into an aesthetic project capable

of disrupting visual and intellectual routines that characterize everyday

dealings with the city. From the observation and photographic conceptu-

alization of a paradigmatic urban environment a symbolic world emerg-

es—and the photographs do not necessarily make this universe more

comprehensible; rather, they heighten, in the mind of attentive observ-

ers, its complexity. Thus, the (self-) built banality of the housing estate

appears enigmatic. Within the frame of printed photos, the traces and

codes of constructive anarchy, superimposed on the Santa Fe Housing

Unit, configure the key visual topics of hyper-urban culture in the early

21th century.

The central topic explored by the photographer-architect through the

subtle documentation of this housing estate is the systematic clash be-

tween modern architecture’s scenography and the various decorative

elements that reproduce like visual parasites all over the Santa Fe Unit.

The original Bauhaus-style balconies right next with neo-baroque balus-

trades, or as it happens in one case, next to one that has been used as a

base for a protrusion with a gabled roof, represent not only is a cultural-

architectonic contradiction, but also the advent of a new order of things:

these structural ruptures and visual clashes question the one-dimension-

al “meaning” of modern architecture, and, through the self-organization

of alternative models—as banal of “ugly” as they might be—increase the

complexity of the entire system. The iteration of the ballustrades dis-

solves the serial pattern of the original architectural design. It is a playful

way to generate new systems of meaning, which alter regularity and

chaos. Even though the formal apparatus of this anarchy is limited (due

to supply within the construction market and the technical abilities and

cultural imagination of self-builders), this is a cultural process that inter-

acts with its given environment and produces unexpected results.

Luque documents these clashes with a certain critical distance. What

represents a nightmare for the defenders of modern architecture be-

comes an aesthetic event, where shapes and colors interact on the basis

of a collage visual principle. In the words of art historian Herbert Molder-

ings, “the decomposition of an object’s identity in whichever number of

aspects or facets, and its montage for the construction of a new ideal

whole,” a principle explored by avant-garde art at the beginning of the

20th century, produces an unexpected aesthetic almost a century later.

p ro po s i t i o n

Further, Onnis Luque’s gaze is a counter-proposal to the sublime synergy

of modern architecture and photography, as practiced by Armando Sa-

las Portugal and Guillermo Zamora in the mid-20th century for the ben-

efit and promotion of new styles of urban living in functionalist housing

units. Luque’s work offers a different form of perception that goes be-

yond the aseptic representation of the modern habitat, in which the final

result coincides with abstract clarity with the project’s model (visible

in the aerial photograph reproduced in this book, shot in 1957, the year

of Santa Fe’s inauguration). In contrast to these period images, Luque

captures the complex signatures of the current reality in megalopolis,

in Mexico and beyond. Visual topic such as the integration of decorous

and fake neo-baroque elements, or the clash of natural elements such

as a tree’s roots (half a century old) with reinforced concrete structures,

produce a visual shock with epistemological potential. However, Luque’s

is not a catastrophic vision, as was described by Camilo José Vergara in

his record of the decline of many American cities, in particular modern-

ist housing complexes. Rather, his portraits of Mexico’s Santa Fe Hous-

ing Unit evince alternative forms of constructive “progress”—forms that

emerge from the interaction of people with the authoritarian fabrications

of large construction companies, and which have led to the decomposi-

tion of a rigid architectural imprint.

In this sense, Luque’s images are polaroid shots of a process of

urban morphology, and as such, they constitute an archive of the socio-

spatial conditions of a distinguished island in the middle of the autopoi-

etic hyper-urbanization referred to as the Metropolitan Area of the Valley

of Mexico. This archive converts objects in images that remain while ar-

chitectural mutations persist. Its images correspond to a socio-cultural

stage with its own parameters for the creation of urban-spatial identities.

The alternative tectonics and texture of the Santa Fe Housing Unit at the

turn of the 21th century is still different from its surroundings, self-built

from scratch, where the chaos holds full sway (as another form of order).

The walled housing estate, with a single access, is still marked with the

IMSS’ logo, which stands out in the collage stage set as an outstanding

socio-cultural model. Its morphology, a hybrid of the original substance

and its self-built mutations, finds, in Luque’s photographs, a good com-

plement, through which the attentive reader or neighbor can augment

his or her visual sensibility towards the environmental and socio-cultural

conditions of the megalopolis—the images open a window towards this

important and ever-enigmatic reality.

The blueprints of the Santa Fe social services and housing unit preserved

in the complex’s archive suggest that its design and construction were

long processes. The oldest, dated 1953, correspond to the clusters of sin-

gle-family houses. The plans of apartment slabs are from 1954, and those

of the social and sports center known as the Casino are from 1956. In all

of them, Mario Pani features as the main architect, but in each stage he

had different associates, including Salvador Ortega, Domingo García Ra-

mos, Luis Ramos Cunningham and Victor Vila.

Mario Pani once said that he drew the plans of the Miguel Aleman hous-

ing unit (1949) in three weeks. And it shows: the complex is assertive

and single-minded, with a zigzagging fourteen-story building that ex-

tends from one end of the plot to the other. The Miguel Alemán was a

pioneering work that sought to demonstrate the feasibility and desirabil-

ity of building social housing in high-rise buildings. Santa Fe, on the other

hand, corresponds to a more reflective moment in Pani’s career—it is a

carefully assembled collage where a wide range of influences and previ-

ous experiences converge. The three years that spanned from the begin-

ning of its design to its completion were spent in conversations among

architects and government functionaries towards the definition and re-

finement of the ideas that gave shape to the housing unit.

Antonio Ortiz Mena was director of the Mexican Social Security Institute

(IMSS) from 1952 to 1958—the Santa Fe complex was an expression of his

vision for the country’s future, which he continued pursuing as minister of

finance, from 1958 to 1970. While the government had built a number of

Influences and Ideas that Shaped the Santa Fe Housing Unit

P A B L O L A N D A R U I L O B A

housing complexes in previous years, Santa Fe was different. Earlier devel-

opments were mostly mortgaged to bureaucrats; Santa Fe’s 2,200 houses

and apartments remained public property and were rented to workers af-

filiated to the IMSS from a wide range of private and public companies.

The fact that houses and apartments were rentals represented both a cri-

tique of private property and something that would allow people to live in

appropriate dwellings at different stages of their life—the smaller houses

and apartments would be assigned to single men and women, or to young

couples, who would move to the larger houses once they had children

and return to a small ones in their old age. Moreover, people would be

able to move to other complexes to be close to their workplaces—Santa

Fe was conceived as a model that would be reproduced all over the coun-

try. In all housing units, there would be a health clinic, schools, and other

spaces for cultural, educational and recreational activities.

While this vision was only partly realized—the IMSS built only eleven more

complexes, houses and apartments in them were assigned without much

consideration to family types, and people rarely moved—it helps interpret

the symbolic dimension of Santa Fe as an attempt at bringing about a new

stage in the country’s history founded on social security, where workers

would have access to a wide range of services and therefore be healthy,

productive and the proud members of the Mexican nation.

Formally, housing complexes built before Santa Fe were composed of

either freely arranged apartment slabs—as in the case of the Miguel

Alemán and Juárez (1952) complexes—or dense groups of houses—as

in the case of the Modelo (1952) and Balbuena (1952) complexes. In San-

ta Fe, a combination of multi-family buildings and single-family houses

were arranged, as onion layers, around a distinct center. Four story build-

ings, variations of two of building types in the Juárez complex, mark the

housing unit’s outer perimeter, and encircle its only street—a one-way

circuit that in its turn surrounds house clusters. Pedestrian walkways

communicate this street to a sloped garden, which on its eastern end

culminates in Santa Fe’s central plaza.

The plaza is surrounded by an expressive brick and concrete building with

one hundred apartments and a series of public institutions: a theater, a

health clinic, commercial spaces, some of which eventually became one

of the many female right-holder’s cultural clubs sponsored by the IMSS

in different “popular neighborhoods.” The plaza also has a kiosk—a con-

crete shell designed by Félix Candela—and a monument consisting of a

sculptural flagpole and a mosaic mural by Jorge González Camarena with

the names, in bronze letters, of some of the most prominent heroes in

Mexico’s official history.

While there sports and commercial spaces and public buildings in other

parts of the complex, including two elementary schools, two kindergar-

tens and a day care center, the Heroes’ Plaza, as it is known in its blue-

prints and by Santa Fe’s inhabitants today, is the complex’s unequivocal

center. This space it is both a site where neighbors gather regularly to

socialize and where events such as assemblies and campaign rallies take

and have taken place for the past half a century.

Santa Fe’s plaza is congruent with the growing centralism of Mexican

politics at the time. As such, it brings together a number of symbolic ele-

ments that would contribute to cement the state’s power and inculcate

a vision of the country’s past and present in the complex’s neighbors—it

was in fact an attempt at giving workers, many of whom formerly lived

in marginal areas, a place at the center of the Mexican nation. In 1957,

when Santa Fe was inaugurated, hundreds gathered in its plaza to hear

Ortiz Mena describe the complex as the culmination of Mexico’s history.

Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, the country’s president, was present in this event,

and so were major union leaders and public officials, including Adolfo

López Mateos, who was elected president in 1958.

Ortiz Mena traced a long process of liberation that had begun a century

before—in 1857, when a liberal constitution guaranteeing freedom of

speech, conscience, religion, and assembly had been ratified. Appropri-

ately, this date appears under Juárez name in Santa Fe’s plaza. The com-

plex was also a strategy whereby the state sought to fulfill “the promises

of the Mexican Revolution,” which were articulated in a new constitution

when the conflict ended. This document included the right to housing,

health and leisure. The year it was ratified, 1917, is memorialized under

president Carranza’s name in the Heroes’ Plaza.

Contiguous to the heroes’ names is a plaque that commemorates Santa

Fe’s inauguration. It includes the name and a poetic quote by president

Ruiz Cortines —he was clearly fashioned as another hero. An almighty

and benevolent leader, he stood at the center of the state—his govern-

ment had the power and the will to fulfill long-postponed promises and

thus, in Ortiz Mena’s words “create… generations of young people who

will live without social resentments, who will mold their character in

gentleness towards their own kind, love for nature, and respect for our

institutions.” Ortiz Mena and Pani knew that carefully articulated central

plazas, with plaques and monuments, are good places for the construc-

tion and affirmation of such myths.

The Heroes’ Plaza follows the model of those in Mexican colonial towns.

The Laws of the Indies stipulated that streets in new settlements should

be laid out in a regular grid, and that one block at its center should be

left empty and surrounded by public buildings and symbols of power,

which always included a Catholic church and the city council. Given the

secularity of the Mexican state at the time, there is no church in Santa

Fe, but its many institutions represent a concerted effort at not only of-

fering state services, but at inscribing them within a national history—a

“sacred atlas of time” that is not unlike those associated with religion.

The colonial model was both conducive to the state’s interests and

close to Pani’s concerns at the time. Early on in his career, in the sec-

ond number of Arquitecura, a magazine he directed, he published a “co-

lonial house” in Northern Africa by Italian architect Luigi Piccinato. The

text that accompanies plans and photos describes it as an “interesting

modern solution to the classical parti of the freestanding Mediterranean

house,” where the architect borrowed from “tradition nothing more than

the essential, the founding idea… which he skillfully adapted to the needs

and conditions of our time” with no ornament and with modern detailing

and materials.

Pani’s projects at the time were much unlike the ideal he identified in

Piccinato’s house. His architecture, however, matured quickly. In the for-

ties, he designed Mexico’s National Teachers’ College, as well as unbuilt

projects for a national library and a sports club for Mexico City’s Span-

ish community. These large-scale complexes are organized around axis

that cut through iconic high-rise buildings and enclosed spaces, around

which other, less prominent buildings are organized. This spatial organi-

zation would reemerge in Pani and Enrique del Moral’s master plan for

the University City of Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM;

1952), and be developed further and adapted to a different typology in

the Santa Fe complex. In these projects, Pani progressively stepped away

from the classical tradition and formulated a Mexican architecture that

is congruent with the ideal he discerned in Piccinato’s house.

In the University City, Pani and Del Moral realized a modern solution for

a ceremonial complex that is, spatially, much more like pre-Hispanic

and colonial buildings and cities than it is like large-scale projects by Le

Corbusier and other modernists. Here, buildings are distinct pieces as-

sembled around a central space, with no circulations for cars. This space

evokes those of colonial haciendas and convents, with their porticoes

around enclosed patios and gardens. The scale of the complex and the

organization of its buildings along a symbolic axis that runs through the

stadium—fashioned as a sacred mountain—and rectory—a high-rise

that presides over the campus’ central space—is similar to Mesoameri-

can cities such as Teotihuacan and Monte Albán.

Moreover, the University City adapts to and celebrates the terrain on

which it was built by mimicking some of its characteristics. The path-

ways that serpent through the volcanic rocks of the Pedregal are re-

produced in the UNAM’s stone walls, staircases and slopes, and in the

corridors between buildings that open up to other buildings and patios.

Pani brought to bear the experience of designing the UNAM when he built

Santa Fe. In the housing complex there are stone walls that form passag-

es, abrupt changes in the land’s level that produce expressive corridors

and public spaces, and sequences that make journeys through the com-

plex dramatic; buildings conceal what lies behind them and thus invite

visitors to walk through or around them, on to other spaces. All of Santa

Fe’s spatial sequences eventually culminate in the Heroes’ Plaza—a more

concentrated center than that of the University City, but much like it as

the core of a complex derived from an established typology; in this case,

the Spanish colonial town.

Some of Santa Fe’s most notable public spaces are the gardens within its

house clusters. Houses are arranged in rows, and served by straight pe-

destrian walkways that communicate the complex’s street to its central

garden. Every certain number of houses, there is a clearing—intimate gar-

dens that occupy the area equivalent to four houses. The experience of en-

tering these gardens is similar to the experience of entering smaller public

spaces adjacent to the central esplanade in the University City. Their ori-

gins, however, can be traced to other sources explored and tested by Pani

in earlier works.

José Luis Cuevas was an architect and urban planner who studied in

England in the first years of the twentieth century. In his design for the

Hipódromo (19xx) and Lomas de Chapultepec (19xx) neighborhoods he

introduced the model of the garden city to Mexico. Simultaneously to

his work for private developers, he did major projects for the govern-

ment—among them is Zacatepec (1937), a town built around a sugar mill

in the state of Morelos, commissioned by president Lázaro Cárdenas. In

this context, he designed housing for the mill’s workers that recalls both

nineteenth-century British industrial cities and vecindades where many

working class Mexicans lived—large houses subdivided into one-room

apartments, with internal patios.

José Luis Cuevas was Pani’s associate in a number of projects. They es-

tablished an urban planning workshop in 1948, and collaborated in the

design of industrial compounds, agricultural towns and new neighbor-

hoods. One of these neighborhoods is the Modelo housing unit, where

some of Zacatepec’s features reemerge. Here, too, houses are not free-

standing structures surrounded by open areas like those of garden cit-

ies, but contiguous and served by walkways. By privileging pedestrian

circulations over streets for cars, the architects were likely moved by

economical considerations—the new houses had to be as economical

as possible, and corridors used less land than streets. Moreover, they

thought perhaps that people should move to spaces similar to those they

knew—the Modelo complex was an improved vecindad, with larger living

quarters, and better ventilation, sanitation and access to gardens and

public spaces.

While Cuevas was not directly involved in the design of Santa Fe, Pani

evidently used the model he first developed in Zacatepec as a point of

departure. The housing clusters are in fact almost identical to some of

the blocks in Zacatepec. What is different is that whereas in this city

houses follow varying arrangements, in Santa Fe, Pani converted one of

them into a standard module that he confidently reproduced it more than

a hundred times, bringing it together with other tested modules—the

buildings in the Juárez complex—into a coherent whole organized around

a center.

Pani, who was an avid reader of international architecture publications,

was no doubt also subject to direct foreign influences. Enrique de Anda,

for example, has suggested that Santa Fe responds to conclusions of the

1951 CIAM on “The Heart of the City.” Other possible sources include Jo-

sep Lluís Sert’s insistence in the 1949 CIAM on the importance of design-

ing “civic centers” and his calling to go beyond “functionalism” in archi-

tecture and attempt to “satisfy the human sprit” —the symbolic content

of Santa Fe might be a response to this suggestion.

However, histories of architecture that privilege center-periphery narra-

tives obscure the complex processes that take place within presumed

peripheries. Santa Fe is not, after all, simply a modern complex, but a

modern complex of a particular kind. As in the case of Piccinato’s colo-

nial house, the housing unit’s architecture is modern—with reinforced

concrete structures, industrial brick and glass façades, and functional

floor plans. Yet it is also distinctly Mexican to the extent that its design

arose from a long process of formulation of social security policies, and

from the adaptation of models and typologies with both local and foreign

origins into a complex conducive to the implementation of these policies.

As is evident when comparing Guillermo Zamora to Onnis Luque’s pho-

tographs, much has changed in Santa Fe since the time of its inaugura-

tion more than half a century ago. Rents remained low, and with infla-

tion, this and other complexes became economically unsustainable. The

IMSS, burdened by mismanagement and the obligation to pay retirement

pensions to millions, concentrated its efforts on that and on the provi-

sion of health care—it abandoned the broad definition of social security

as an instrument of nation-building and social engineering that it had

advanced through the construction of social services and housing units.

The process whereby Santa Fe was privatized and converted into

a condominium began in 1984. Its houses and apartments were sold to

their occupants for discounted fees and the IMSS abandoned many of

the responsibilities it had earlier assumed. Social workers, gardeners,

maintenance staff and other government employees ceased to be seen

in Santa Fe. New homeowners began modifying their living environment,

something that was forbidden at the time of the IMSS: many built new

stories over their houses, added decorative elements to façades, and

walled off common areas. Santa Fe’s house clusters, as seen in Luque’s

photos, are practically unrecognizable, and buildings have various ap-

pendages and modifications.

Today, many in Santa Fe describe the first thirty years of the

complex as a paradise. IMSS employees promptly attended to their every

need, and disputes among neighbors were settled by authority figures

recognized by all. The services offered in the complex helped thousands

to advance socially and economically—they moved swiftly from the

working to the middle class, and became one of its most solid sectors.

On the other hand, today some public areas in the complex look aban-

doned, walls are covered in graffiti, chains and gates interrupt streets to

reserve parking spaces, and the legitimacy of the local administration is

questioned constantly. If Santa Fe was once imagined as a foreshadow-

ing of Mexico’s future, today it is an eccentric social and architectural

experiment from a long-gone era.

By pointing this out, neighbors express their support for project as it was

initiated in the nineteen-fifties, and condemn the transformations under-

gone by the Mexican state in its shift towards neoliberalism. The ideals

that were formulated through the creation of Santa Fe appear to have

been lost—people in the complex are not necessarily “gentle towards

their own kind” nor have respect for institutions. The present is not,

however, as bad as neighbors suggest, nor is the complex as radically dif-

ferent from what it once was. While the people of Santa Fe are no longer

the privileged subjects of the Mexican state they once were, property

ownership gave them financial security and thus greater opportunities

to express their opinions and participate in the country’s public life as

autonomous agents.

Moreover, the modifications undergone by the complex reveal the lasting

success of Pani and Ortiz Mena’s project. Once Santa Fe was privatized,

its inhabitants easily appropriated the complex—the structure of houses

welcomed additions and modifications and, even without the orchestra-

tion of the state, gardens within clusters and the central plaza remained

spaces where people interact and come together as a community. No-

tably, the Heroes’ Plaza is still the symbolic center of the complex, and

the historical narrative embodied in its monument remains current—it

seems that people in Santa Fe are in fact members of the Mexican nation

as Ortiz Mena and his collaborators once imagined it.

When the Zapatista uprising began in the Mexican state of Chiapas, a

group of young men from the housing unit carved the name “Marcos” to

the side of the bronze names of other heroes. The mid-nineties were a

period of political unrest. The country was struggling to adapt to abrupt

changes such as the privatization of Santa Fe, and many were dissatis-

fied with the PRI, which seemed undefeatable through political means.

The Zapatista movement offered a source of hope—as its figurehead,

Marcos had made an opening in the political system, and thus helped

people envision alternatives. One of the men who wrote Marcos on the

wall told me recently this is why he and his friends, in a moment of ela-

tion, decided that he deserved a place in Mexico’s history, and therefore

on Santa Fe’s wall. I asked him if it would not have made more sense to

put this history to the side instead of adding new heroes to it. Perhaps

a more reasonable act of rebellion would have been to take down the

bronze names on the wall—but they remain intact.