Karl Marx once wrote that humankind sets itself the tasks that it can solve. These tasks, however, are part of a particular historical paradigm in which the material conditions are already present for their solutions or are, at least, in their formative stages. The history of Mexican modern architecture is the paradigm through which Enrique Norten’s work operates and responds. Within this logic, it is insufficient to describe the work of Norten as being representative of a tension of postmodern globalization. Equally inadequate would be to ascribe to it a character derived solely from the metropolitan condition of Mexico City, the geographic center of his practice. Although historians have been quick to judge the work as foreign to Mexican sensibilities and to say that, using Marx’s own logic, it offers solutions that are not present in Mexico’s material conditions of production, we can see it as inheritor of the legacies of Mexico’s historical avant-garde. It would be best, therefore, to position Norten as a figure in a long historical lineage that comprises the history of modern architecture in Mexico.
Like his immediate architectural forefathers, Juan O’Gorman and the radical functionalists, Norten’s work uses the most contemporary materials—in his case, stainless steel, concrete, and glass—to reconceptualize our understanding of these within the context and the needs of contemporary Mexico. Surely it would be easy to ascribe to them as foreign, but the tradition of modern forms and sensibilities is deeply rooted and is part of the Mexican landscape. What Norten has done is to make them do things that they had not done before. He was using them, in other words, not as signifiers of a new modernity to the exterior world but rather as referents of a new self-identity. Although critics lament the loss of a Mexican architecture—a loss founded on some mythical and highly ideological construction of history and style—the development of Norten’s work shows an active relation with the tradition of syncretism, experimentation, alternate space making, and legibility. These, historically, have been part of the modus operandi of architects and builders since the time of the colony. Norten’s work, therefore, poignantly shifts architectural production from purely formal and stylistic references to the conceptual explorations of these traditions.
Norten is, himself, a result of modern syncretism: trained at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His work is part of a collaborative effort of the firm that he founded in 1985 (TEN Arquitectos: Taller de Enrique Norten), which was joined by Bernardo Gómez-Pimienta in 1987. Norten’s teaching, much like his practice, is not limited to Mexico, as he has also taught throughout the United States.
Norten’s early work, such as the Lighting Center (1988–89) in Mexico City and Houses N and R (1989–90) in Valle de Bravo, expresses an active investigation into the materiality of architecture. Both buildings express not only the craft tradition of brick construction but also a reconfiguration of traditional architectural elements through the introduction of industrialized materials. As with the historical avant-garde, these new materials, however, are mediated equally by the hand of the craftsman. Perforated sheet metal, for example, was painstakingly punched by hand, reminding us of the obsession of craft in William Morris’s work. In Houses N and R, we find the result of morphological explorations of the home as mediated by the telluric agency of the place. The pitched, tiled roof clearly references vernacular forms. The open, double-height interiors and the reliance on industrial materials express, in contrast, the elimination of forms needed in this geographic place. Instead of reproducing the typology of the courtyard common to Valle de Bravo, for example, Norten chose to reflect what that typology does through an exploration of how the materials themselves can render and express what traditional form has maintained for centuries. The same can be said of the Brasil Street Workers Housing (1991–92), which adheres to some of the social concerns of the radical Mexican functionalists about the role of architecture and ornament. This building resolves a traditional typological requirement for a vecindad (an internalized and autonomous neighborhood) through the disposition of the housing block, circulation system, and courtyard, while ornament is explicitly abolished and the materials and forms are left to speak for themselves. In addition, the project itself solves a concern that has been at the forefront of Mexican modern architecture since the revolution: housing for the urban proletariat.
The work of the Alliance Française (1990–92), Moda en Casa (1991–93), and Insurgentes Theater (1993–95) reflects a long tradition of experimentation with known forms and stylistic traditions. In the same way that Alberti’s Four Books on Architecture was interpreted in the Spanish colony or Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture was read as a manifesto for a revolutionary architecture in the 1920s and 1930s, these works show a keen understanding and incorporation of a contemporary stylistic vocabulary. Here, the formal language of Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, and other contemporary architects is competently presented and reproduced using a craft tradition that would appear to be antithetical to its forms. These projects would become building blocks for some of Norten’s later work insofar as they explore tectonic expression, materiality, and craft.
His later work illustrates an additive process of forms, materials, and spaces. Paradigmatic of this are the National School Theater (1993–94) and the TELEVISA Services Building (1993–95), all in Mexico City; House LE (1994–95); and the Addams Hall and Fine Arts Building (1999–) at the University of Pennsylvania. Although they conform to the concerns outlined previously, this new work—of which part is located or proposed outside of Mexico—could be described as a spatial inversion of its predecessors. In it, the shift is rendered from the objects in space of his earlier work (which create clearly defined spatial boundaries) to the objects within spaces of his later work (which create internalized formal and spatial relations within sometimes ambiguous boundaries). This transformation could also be understood as a shift from clearly tectonic expressions to a messy stereotomic manifestation—messy because the concerns of structural expression are in tension with the volume of the architectural objects and because these volumes are rendered primarily as thin surfaces in tension around a seemingly exaggerated structural frame. We could ascribe to this work the volumetric qualities of pre-Hispanic forms as they sit on the landscape. However, their forms, materials, and structures develop new formal relationships with the interior, where, while appearing to close off from the exterior, they generate new spatial interrelationships with the interior.
LUIS E. CARRANZA
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2. Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.
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