Casa de la Asegurada: A Collective Housing Facility for Women Development in Mexico

While several women’s movements that aimed to modify their relationship with public space were taking place across the world, in 1956, the Mexican Social Security Institute founded the program Casa de la Asegurada, the subject of this study, as a tool for improving the social security of Mexican families through the input of cultural, social, artistic, and hygienic knowledge for women. The program’s facilities, Casas de la Asegurada, are located in the large Mexican housing complexes, articulating themselves to the existing city. Despite the impact on the lives of Mexican families, these have been ignored throughout the history of Mexican architecture. The main objective of this paper is to show the state of the art of Casa de la Asegurada and its facilities located in Mexico City. To achieve this, the greatest number available of primary sources on the topic was compiled through archive and document research. Sources were classified identifying information gaps to explain, in three different scales (program, facilities, and a case study), how they work through their objectives, performed activities, and evolved through time, so that the gathered information is analyzed with an urbanistic, architectural, and gender approach to contribute new ideas in the building of facilities that allow women empowerment.

Abraham Zabludovsky as a representative of brutalism in Mexican architecture

Brutalism was a trend that appeared in architecture in response to the International Style, with preference forthe aesthetics of machines and clean geometric forms striving for lightness and stylistic purity. Le Corbusieris considered to be the precursor of this style, but its concept was best presented both in theory and practiceby Alison and Peter Smithson. Th e idea of expressing form, the sincerity of material, and deriving fromwhat could be found in the area of construction has spread throughout the world. In Mexico, an architect ofPolish descent, Abraham Zabludovsky, became an advocate of Brutalism and, along with Teodor Goznalezde Leon, has created many buildings which are now iconic for the of Mexico city. Th is study aims to presentthe case of Zabludovsky’s architectural concepts.

The avant-garde in the architecture and visual arts of Post-Revolutionary Mexico

Commenting on an exhibition of contemporary Mexican architecture in Rome in 1957, the polemic and highly influential Italian architectural critic and historian, Bruno Zevi, ridiculed Mexican modernism for combining Pre-Columbian motifs with modern architecture. He referred to it as ‘Mexican Grotesque’. Inherent in Zevi’s comments were an attitude towards modern architecture that defined it in primarily material terms; its principle role being one of “spatial and programmatic function”. Despite the weight of this Modernist tendency in the architectural circles of Post-Revolutionary Mexico, we suggest in this paper that Mexican modernism cannot be reduced to such “material” definitions. In the highly charged political context of Mexico in the first half of the 20th Century, modern architecture was perhaps above all else, a tool for propaganda. In this political atmosphere it was undesirable, indeed it was seen as impossible, to separate art, architecture and politics in a way that would be a direct reflection of Modern architecture’s European manifestations. Form was to follow function, but that function was to be communicative as well as spatial and programmatic. One consequence of this “political communicative function” in Mexico was the combination of the “mural tradition” with contemporary architectural design; what Zevi defined as “Mexican Grotesque”. In this paper, we will examine the political context of Post-Revolutionary Mexico and discuss what may be defined as its most iconic building; the Central Library at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico . In direct counterpoint to Zevi, we will suggest that it was far from grotesque, but rather was one of the most committed political statements made by the Modern Movement throughout the Twentieth Century. It was propaganda, it was political. It was utopian.

Guardians of Their Own Health

José Villagrán García's Tuberculosis Sanatorium at Huipulco (1929–36), outside of Mexico City, was one of Mexico's first important modern buildings. Commissioned by the federal government and designed to cure and transform the Mexican working class, the project reflected its architect's pioneering integration of architectural rationalism, Julien Guadet's theories, and the reform ambitions of the Mexican government. At Huipulco, Villagrán also referenced established sanatorium design as a means of visually associating Mexican architecture and medicine with admired European practices in both fields. In Guardians of Their Own Health: Tuberculosis, Rationalism, and Reform in Modern Mexico, Kathryn E. O'Rourke argues that understood in the context of Mexican social policy and compared to buildings by Guadet's famous student Auguste Perret, the Huipulco Sanatorium reveals the reach of French rationalism and the complex genesis of modern architecture in Mexico. Its story helps to historicize and particularize the International Style within histories of modern architecture and open further the question of how modern architecture was understood by architects working beyond European centers.