Politics of Fabrication III: Framing Political Conflict in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico City

Francisco Gonzalez de Canales, Nuria Alvarez Lombardero

The unit continues to explore the changing political implications of trajectories between digital fabrication and low-tech construction, looking at new ways of distributing the role of architects and users in contemporary cities. We are interested in the social and cultural dimensions of design in how alternative modes of making, closely related to everyday life activities, can define the political agency of the individuals who inhabit the city.

This year Intermediate 8 will be working in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, located in Mexico City, one of the largest and certainly one of the most conflicted urban agglomerations in the world. Las Tres Culturas square is well known not only for the mixed presence of Aztec, Spanish Colonial and modernist constructions, but also for its political life including the infamous 1968 massacre.

This event occurred ten days before Mexico hosted the Olympics, when students protested for more freedom to express themselves while chanting 'No queremos olimpiadas, queremos revolución!' ('We don't want the Olympics, we want revolution!'). The Mexican Army attacked the 50,000 students who congregated in the square causing a disaster that killed more than 30, with hundreds wounded and thousands arrested. The plaza continues to be a centre of political expression in Mexico City.

During the year students will deploy designs specifically related to this sociocultural context, including food culture, dance and music, memory, wheeling and dealing, illegal activities or transcultural relations, and will generate different understandings about how to define a contemporary public space in Mexico City. These explorations will frame the existing conflicts in the city as a way of demonstrating pluralistic expressions in public as opposed to an attempt to define and implement singular solutions to these contentious relationships.

The work will be divided into three phases. First, we will define a pertinent issue relevant to the inhabitants of Mexico City based on their everyday lives. Second, this issue will be framed and manifested into a proposed spatial configuration. Third, we will focus on how the people of Mexico City can physically realise this spatial configuration in relation to the different construction processes available to them. Following Hannah Arendt's thoughts on politics, these construction processes manifested in public and constructed as physical registers acquire a political value as a public act and a means of preserving multiple ways of life through confrontation and agonism.

Unit Staff

Francisco González de Canales studied architecture at ETSA Seville, ETSA Barcelona and Harvard University, and worked for Foster+ Partners and Rafael Moneo before setting up the award-winning office Canales & Lombardero. He has previously lectured in England, Mexico, Spain and the USA and is the current AACP coordinator. He has recently published the book Experiments with Life Itself (Actar 2011) based on his PhD research on the radical domestic experiments of the 1940s and 1950s.

Nuria Alvarez Lombardero studied architecture and urbanism at ETSA Madrid and the AA. She has worked for Machado & Silvetti Associates in Boston and served on the editorial board of Neutra Magazine. Since 2003 she co-directs the London- Seville based office Canales & Lombardero. She has previously taught studio in the University of Cambridge and TEC Monterrey and lectured on urbanism in the University of Seville. After working as a researcher at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge and the AA. She is currently finalising her PhD on the dissolution of boundaries traced by modern urban planning.