The 1920's became a decade of transition, of political and social adjustment and the time where culture would start to play a more active role in the agenda of modernization.ĭiego Rivera, who had spent time in Europe in touch with avant-garde artists and ideas of the time returned to Mexico and began influencing other artists and architects in assimilating and adapting these ideas to Mexico's context. The armed movement and the turmoil that followed were certainly a traumatic event and only after 1921, could a stable condition be found for modern architecture to flourish in Mexico.

In 1910, Mexico was entering what would become a 10-year revolution to transform the existing country's social, economic and political institutions. The origins of this paradox can be traced more specifically to the beginning of the 20th century and the way that the Mexican Revolution served as the ideological underpinning for a new relationship between culture and social transformation. This is what sociologist Nestor Garcia-Canclini has called the paradox of an 'exuberant (cultural) modernism with a deficient (sociopolitical and economic) modernization.' These fragments expose a crack which is already hinted at in the title of the exhibition, and which is the disengagement in Mexico between the technical, economic and social modernity from that of the architectural modernity.

In this essay, four fragments are presented as possible explanations for this prolific and diverse production.

These fragments seem to be the most productive way to reconstruct a reasonable curiosity in forms of architecture that have relevance beyond their specific historical condition. In spite of the efforts by theorists and historians to construct a canon, whether one built around monumentalism, site, ideology and revolution, exceptionality or an adapted modernism, the history of Mexican modern architecture can better be grasped as an array of fragments that explain the diverse and heterogeneous production of over 50 years of design and building. The exhibition Mexican Modernisms, starts with the assumption that there is not one single homogeneous history of modern architecture in Mexico but rather a complex and multiple set of narratives and productions.

Historia de la arquitectura pdf pdf