The Preservation of Historic Architecture and the Beliefs of the Modern Movement in Mexico: 1914-1963

Abstract

Mexican modernist architects were deeply involved in the preservation of the country's cultural heritage at least a generation before the Mexican state formally promulgated legislation defending the country's patrimony. As early as the 1910s, in conjunction with the Mexican revolution, a critical reassessment of the country's architectural past began, focusing especially on the viceregal period, the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Architects in Mexico City, particularly those associated with the national school of architecture, remained leading promoters of the new European functionalist architecture, but also advocates of inscribing it within the entire continuum of Mexican building history—including pre-Columbian works—as part of the same tradition. Part of the reason modernism was accepted as the new lingua franca of Mexican architecture in the postwar era was because it was by then understood as a variation of a long architectural and vernacular tradition that could be understood within the far broader rubric of Mexicanness.