dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
künstler: Carlos Lazo Barreiro
titel: University City of UNAM
jahr: since 1950
adresse: Coyoacán, México D.F.
+: Complex of buildings and spaces which belong to the main campus of the National Autononous University of Mexico (UNAM) situated in the surroundings of the Pedregal of San Ángel, in the south of the City of Mexico.
«In the midst of his battles with the University City architects and engineers [from 1952 to 1953], Siqueiros presented a lecture in their social and cultural center, Casa del Arquitecto – 'International Architecture at the Tail End of Bad Painting: In Mexico the Abstractionism of Paris and Our Mexican Curios Plan its Destruction.' He told his audience, mainly architects, that they could not deny the influence that the formalism of Paris held over Mexican architecture; that in the past, architecture had been plastically integrated with the arts but its dismemberment began during the Renaissance with the private acquisition of art. He quoted Raziel Cabildo, leader of the art students' strike in 1911 who, before the Revolution, had said, 'Painting separated from architecture is like a dead organ ripped out of a vital body. And architecture without painting and sculpture is a body without a voice.'
Siqueiros made the point that after the Revolution the painters had adopted realism, whereas the architects had thaken the road of style, developing neocolonialism or 'Mexican colonialism.' Neither the architects of the 'sterile neocolonial style' nor the 'functionalists' who followed Le Corbusier had seen (sic) fit to add art to their buildings. The architects of the Mexican colonial style claimed that the murals of the new Mexican art movement did not fit in with their architecture; on the other hand, the functionalists claimed heir architecure possessed its own plastic integrity, so they did not support adding art to it.
After the Revolution, the new rich followed not only Le Corbusier but Frank Lloyd Wright and the modern Germans, and at the same time a false nationalism arose in the arts, a 'Mexican decoraivism.' Finally, art for art's sake arrived from Erope and the United States.
It was an art for the select few, our new rich were enthusiastic. There was nothing more interesting for a member of the new rich than that wihich they do not understand, and pure art, the aristocratic abstraction, began to develop. It is now bad taste not to follow the aesthetic line of Paris – in woman's fashion, and in painting, scuplture and architecture.
Siqueiros next turned his attention to what those who had filled te small lecture room were waiting to hear, the design of University City. First he emphasized the importance of constructing such a vast architectural project and then reminded the architects that the claim had been made 'that it would be built by Mexicans with Mexican materials.' The project should have been a great opportunity for the plastic arts of Mexico, and he expressed disappointment that muralists had not been included in its planning. Though he credited the architects with making an effort to abandon the Le Corbusier concept of the building as 'machine,' he lamented that architecture itself, as he described it, had become considered either sculpture or painting. For im Cuidad (sic) Universitaria represented Mexico's greatest architectural effort, but it was under the influence of European formalism.
There is an enormous quantity of 'ears,' of useless cartilage with no reason for being, costing the nation millions. Such is the consequence of pictorial plasticism's influence on architecture. In University City the amount of useless designs […] made for artistic reasons, for reasons of 'beauty,' is enormous; there are scenographic designs that lack any sense of architectural function. In University City there is evidence of the most negative thinking presently dominating the intellectual atmosphere of our country. I refer to this unrestrained love for the antique – the most paradoxical and strange thing in modern art – for the old, for the rudimentary, for the rustic.
Following Frank Lloyd Wright, we put stones into the houses that fence in pigs in the country, 'because the stones of these pigsties are beautiful.' What are these patches, these cartilages […] of University City? They are concrete, but covered with stone. Is there any difference between this architectonic fact and the hollow columns of California architecture? The are exactly the same. Is it that we, living in a land of great pre-Hispanic architecture, have forgotten that the walls or ramparts of stone, in truth constructed in stone, were invariably painted? This came about not only because form without color is not form – this was perfectly understood by the classics – but because the paint covering impermeabilized the stone.
Siqueiros spoke of the two currents operating in Mexican architecture that were so evident in University City: the 'Le Corbusier cosmopolites' on the one hand, and on the other those who wanted to 'Mexicanize' architecture by 'covering the same cosmopolite structures with costumes: huiples (a native dress) and Mexican shirts – a typical North American just returning from Cuernavaca.' Questioning the notion of creating a beautiful architecture with ornamental tricks, Siqueiros warned against copying pre-Hispanic monuments without understanding their relationship to the time of their creation. With soul-searching eloquence he told the architects they were in error and would be 'lost,' if rather than follow the solution to their problem they permitted their style to come first.
The one work of all the structures that he found architecturally valid was the sports stadium, but he criticized Rivera for having used archiaic materials (natural colored stones of Mexico), which produced a primitive work. He decried the false idea that a Mexican national architecture could be created by covering the outside of the buildings with ancient and traditional Mexican motifs. Such an architecture for a country so poor,
where people slept in the streets, hundreds of thousands of children were hungry, sixty percent of the population were illiterate; where peasants die of hunger, where so many fundamental things still remain to be done, these 'snob' manifestations, suitable for fashion designers, are not only stupid, but criminal.
Before ending his lecture, Siqueiros offered the architects hard advice, pointing out the direction they must take to create, for social reasons, a practical and realistic architecture. The 'a priori cosmopolitan, pre-Cortésiana' artistic expression must end. Mexican architecture has to have a popular feeling, but not as it is being produced, with an 'aristocratic intellectualist feeling disguised as popular. No decree can change it. Only through systematic and critical revision of that is being done can change be realized.'
His remarks were not happily received, and a few days later architect Mauricio Gómez Mayorga told the press that Siqueiros simply did not have any idea of what was going on in Mexico in recent times, that right after the Mural Movement started in 1922, Mexican architecture also started in a new direction with José Villagran García's Institute of Health, and Carlos Obregón Santacilia's Ministry of Public Health.
For Gómez Mayorga, Siqueiros's 'integration' was seen as having political undertones, and the architects were not going to permit the painters to get a foot in the door of their domain. Plastic integration would come, Gómez Mayorga siad, as a result of 'stylistic maturity; one need not search for it but only arive at it.' What Siqueiros and the rest of the painters wandted, he said, was to
put words to the architecture without concern as to whether it suited it or not – like the vulgar, who shen they find a piece of music they like, cannot resist putting workds to it. […] They believe that in everything, through style, there is a message of 'social redemption' or any other thing. They do not understand that a wall has a value, as does the beam or the column, that hey have halue for themselves, and it is not necessary that crude works, ridiculously putting down words in order to say something, be painted on top. It is the who does not feel the tectonic, the structural, the essential, the formative of the architecture. It is he who has to paint everything with a public message, who wants all our buildings to be painted because otherwise whey would remain without knowing what to do.
'The buildings should not be tattoed, not one vulgar nontranscendent tattoo!' Gómez Hayorga was quoted as saying. He defended modern Mexican architecture, which Siqueiros had called neo-Porfirioistic because of its political and intellectual dependence on foreign influence, as in the days of Porfirio Díaz, maintaining that the Mexican architects in their thirty years of stuggle had broken away from the academy and Porfirioism, and had finally won 'a struggle to the death with the patrons to make them accept the modern truth.' Denying any neo-Porfirioism, as Siqueiros expressed it, Gómez Mayorga then proceeded to list the architects who had inspired the Mexicans, from Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius on through Le Corbusier. For hin, revolutionalry painting and modern architecture were in contradiction, and Siqueiros at the university had broken with the architecture; he 'seek to disintegrate it to the benefit of the painting.' Siqueikros agreed that, for tecnical reasons, art was subordinate to architecture, but claimed the architects had employed art, not from the start, as an ingetral constituent, as he had urged, but as an afterthought.
Architect Raúl Cacho Alvarez also joined the war of words and gave a statement to the press attacking Siqueikros and defending the highly touted modern architecture of Mexico. He charged Siqueiros, 'a declared Marxist,' with attempting to lead a new revolutionary movement while 'he paints for the [North] Americans and attacks the architects on shose works he is painting murals.' Cacho Alvarez agreed with Siqueiros that problems could be resolved with cooperation, but then stated that today there was no necessitiy for 'flashing caudiollos or epic heores.' He took Siqueiros to tast for his attacks against Mario Pani, Enrique del Moral, and Salvador Ortega, the architects of the Rectoria, and the asked:
Why does this militant Marxist with his dislike for abstract painting, which he considers to be out of place in Mexico and a product af bad hidden desires that come from both the French and the Nortz Americans, why is this enemy of the forces that he calls imperialist, painting a decorative mural on the facade of the building of the North American company, the Chrysler Corporation?
Cacho called University City 'the greatest example in the world within functionalist arhcitecture' for architectural teamwork and he apologized for there being so few walls to paint. However, he praised the chief architect, Lazo, for affording the recognition and importance that he had given to Mexican painting. There were then only five painters doing murals on the huge university, and though Raúl Chacho claimed there was teamwork among the architects, there was little between architects and artists.
Siqueiros alone spoke out but his voice criticizing the foolishness and frivolity of the latest architecure was heard, and he very much upset the 'daring' Mexican architects. The press sought his opinions:
You can imagine tourists, seeing the sports area from the highway, saying 'Look there is a pyramid. Stop the car, let's got investigate it.' And when they get there what do they find? They find it's a modern fronton court.
The architects never failed to respond with personal attacks and never tired of accusing him of selling his works to the bourgeoisie. His portaits were always in great demand; even Carlos Lazo, chief architect of the university, sat for him. This brought more attacks from architects sho could not afford the luxury, to whom Siqueiros responded:
I sell my portraits, not my ideology. Perhaps painting this portrait impies the sale of my political ideology to the particular functionary? Or is it the reverse: the fact that I am producing such a work obliges architect Lazo to accept my own political or aesthetic points of view? Lazo pays me with money, and in no way with capitulation.
Siqueiros also questioned whether there was not a similarity between
the spectacultarly artistic character of the Palace of Fine Arts (built by Porfirio Díaz) and the new-Porfirioist new National Conservatory of Music? […] They are construction buildings today that are obviously absurd, expensive and either totally or partially lacking all practical sense, as happended during the most demagogic period of General Díaz; with the money ot the people they are building for the service of the slelct few.
The furor stirred up by his Casa del Arquitecto lecture had produced so much distortion that Siqueiros invited the press and intellectuals of all persuasions to his studio to listen to a tape recording of the ôldious' lecute. Then on October 9, in the larger Manuel M. Ponce auditorium of the Palace of Fine Arts, to a packed audience, he delivered a second lecture: 'Artifice and Social-Aestehetic Truth in Architecure or, What They Said I Said, What in Effect I Said, and What I Failed to Say.'
He continued with his Thesis that the Mexican Architects reflected
the European and Yankee 'Vanguard Styles' […] delevoping an architecture that could not be described as scenography, 'set,' and this, for reasons primordinally emotional and artistic they conceived through the apriority of style.
Modern architecture, he explained, was outside any reality that would correspond to Mexican nationality. This 'young architecture and fumbling plastic integration,' was an obvious manifestation of a new Porfirioism, which new public construction and the 'thousands of recent private constructions in the districts of the rich' bore out. Besides, how could architects and artists of 'aristocratic intellect, with no solid political base, whose doctines and practice were more ornamentalist than constructive,' meet the needs of the Mexican people, at their present historical stage, with funcional architecture and plastic integration? With the government spending millions to meet national needs, as required by the Constitution, was the public responding, both practically and artistically, as they had in the past to 'comparable great works'?
Siqueiros hammered away at his points ever more forcefully. Was the new architecture 'any different from the spectacles and pageants that Porfirioism producted during its epoch of great economic demogogy'? And now, all construction was permeated with 'commercial speculation,' affecting 'a fundamentally decorativist plasticist tendency that disavowed any outside authentic functional fulfillment.' He further claimed that combining the emphasis on the abstract of the Paris School with the Mexican decorative served the 'commercially speculative and formalist inclination of architecture,' an alliance little affected by the Mural Movement.
In the end Siqueiros told his audience that it was the new national bourgeoisie that had developed out of the Revolution, combined with the 'remains of the odl Porfiristas,' who were the power controlling commercial architecture as well as the plastic arts. He felt it was necessary to condemn their ignorance and negation of the positive forces in the plastic arts who were capable of bringing to fruitition a truly national and universal culture in Mexico.»
(Stein 1994, p. 219–224)
