Ciudad Universitaria

 
A few months ago, UNESCO declared the University City campus of the UNAM a World Heritage Site, adding it, along with the Sydney Opera House, to the limited number of modern works deserving of this status.
Ciudad Universitaria is the most important collective work of the mid-twentieth century in Mexico. Its distinctive character resides in its unique blend of international modernity and local idiosyncrasies. More than sixty architects participated in the project, in which free plans, strip windows, and the structural independence of the façade plane are combined with pre-Hispanic-style ramps and stairways and the use of local materials. Architects and painters worked together to bring to life the concept of "plastic integration," incorporating the expressiveness of the Mexican visual tradition into a modern architectural support.
Fifty-five years later, this urban organism is alive and being reactivated by new infrastructure that includes buildings as well as physical and virtual networks: a development that brings together teaching, research, and broadcasting, alongside bicycle paths, pedestrian networks, and public transport, to recover the spirit which originally breathed life into University City. In recent years, the special projects office under the direction of Felipe Leal has constructed forty new buildings to be integrated into the context of their modernist forebears, including two outstanding designs by Leal himself: a self-service bicycle center for those who use this method of transport on the campus, and the gift shop of the UNAM's own Pumas soccer team.
But the work which has generated the most expectation and controversy is Teodoro González de León's University Museum of Contemporary Art, soon to be inaugurated. Co-author of the very first designs for Ciudad Universitaria, González de León has proposed a sky-lighted sequential space at the antipodes of the neutrality of the multifunctional hangars preferred by so many contemporary artists. The cubes of white concrete, illuminated by skylights within a circumference, recall the circular, mandalic plan of the thin glass membranes constructed by Kazuyo Sejima in Kanazawa. Miquel Adrià