Review: Artifacts of Revolution: Architecture, Society, and Politics in Mexico City, 1920–1940 by Patrice Elizabeth Olsen

Abstract

Patrice Elizabeth Olsen Artifacts of Revolution: Architecture, Society, and Politics in Mexico City, 1920–1940 . Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008, xviii + 281 pp., no illus. $80, ISBN 9780742554207 Urban historian Patrice Elizabeth Olsen's recent book is a thoroughly researched examination of political history in relation to architecture in Mexico City during successive post-Revolutionary presidential administrations from 1920 to 1940. The author's premise “is that significant cultural and political agendas of the Mexican Revolution can be made intelligible through an understanding of works of architecture built in the formative years 1920–1940—the artifacts of the Revolution in Mexico City. This architecture provides us with a means of tracing and understanding the path of the consolidation of the Mexican Revolution, constituting indelible evidence of the process by which that revolution evolved into government” (xi). With this in mind, Olsen explores the intertwining of post-Revolutionary architecture and politics in the capital, using presidential terms, political agendas and upheavals, and significant works of architecture as points of demarcation. Olsen's preface contextualizes the book and introduces the reader to the bustle and underlying forces of contemporary Mexico City. Chapters one and two describe the political ideologies and architectural agendas during the regimes of Alvaro Obregon (1920–24) and Plutarco Elias Calles (1924–28). Chapter three examines the pluralistic nature of …