Colin Marshall

Mexico City's Ryugyong

"For all its flaws," writes Dan Visel at With Hidden Noise, "Mexico City seems much more alive, more full of possibility, more creative, than New York does right now." I guess I must agree; despite having spent no time in New York, I now find myself scheduling a fall trip to the Distrito Federal. The project of stuffing my unconscious mind with information about Mexico City led me to discover, along with dozens upon dozens of intriguing galleries and eateries, the Condominio Insurgentes, the D.F.'s equivalent of Pyongyang's Ryugyong Hotel:

 

 

One difference between the Ryugong Hotel and the Condominio Insurgentes: people actually live in the Condominio Insurgentes. The scant information available holds that, once Mexico City's swankest building, it now hosts mostly single mothers, illegal Cuban or Colombian immigrants, squatters, and part-time brothel operators. One upper floor burnt up twenty years ago, never to be restored to livability. Totally abandoned after some disgraced politican jumped to his death out of it — or after someone killed a judge in there; I can't quite figure out which — the top floor holds nothing but dusty old furniture. Mexico City's 1985 earthquake seems to have put the final nail in the building's coffin, though it lives on, zombielike — with about as much maintenance as a zombie gets.

 

 

Given my interest in urban design, disastrous efforts thereof, and the dead buildings that result, I feel amost fated to want to know more about the Condominio Insurgentes. I only have enough Spanish to draw out the broad outlines from forum posts and Youtube comments and such, but from what I can tell, it came up as the first Latin American mixed-use complex of its scale. I've read that, aside from the occasional decades-shuttered bar with half-full beers still sitting on the tables, plenty of shops still operate on the bottom floor. (The letters spelling "CANADA" down the side once indicated the presence of a "Canadian shoe store." Your guess is as good as mine.) Stories conflict as to what goes on on the other nineteen; matters of whether and what sort of people occupy them come down to a haze of conflicting guesses.

 

 

Mexico City first came to fascinate me when I learned that Paul Verhoeven shot most of Total Recall's Earth scenes there, barely bothering to disguise the place. Much of the film's subway action actually happens at the Metro Insurgentes station, not far at all, as you'd expect, from the Condominio Insurgentes. They also burnt a lot of film in a military academy just outside the city which Verhoeven praises on the DVD commentary track for its New Brutalism. This gave me the impression that triumph-of-the-planning-committee architectural statements dominated Mexico City, but my visions of a northerly Brasília turned up false. It just doesn't seem like the kind of place where those projects can get much of a foothold; we have more examples of boldly socialistic architecture in the States.

 

 

Still, word on the street has it that the Condominia Insurgentes stays in disrepair due to what strikes me as a very Soviet-bloc reason: multiple owners and/or managers, none of whom have a specifically delineated set of responsibilities, exist in irresolvable deadlock. I suppose that, when something breaks, none of them wants to address the complaint and thus become the lightning rod for all the other complaints. And jeez, you could find a lot to complain about on the exterior alone. Sure, a fire tore through some of it, but buildings don't just fall apart like this, do they? Even though it comes after decades of neglect, this sheer dilapidation makes me think someone must've taken a very low-bidding contractor, if not Ryugyong low.

 

 

You'll find the Condominio Insurgentes in the Colonia Roma — also known as the neighborhood where Peter Greenaway film composer Michael Nyman lives — at La Avenida de los Insurgentes #300, between Queretaro and Zacatecas. I couldn't find it conventionally listed, so I had to tale a little walk on Google Maps' street view to find it. Luckily, the building pops out pretty distinctively on the local skyline:

 

Tom Wolfe: From Bauhaus to Our House

This is not a well respected study of modern architecture, but it’s a damned well written one. Of course, Tom Wolfe isn’t a well respected authority on anything other than writing damned well. Knowing only his way with words and his anti-fandom of modernism in all manifestations, I picked up this book hoping only for a good articulation of an opinion I don’t hold. I’ve made a hobby of reading the best possible versions of arguments with which I disagree; maybe this is just superstition, but it strikes me as somehow... healthy?

Wolfe argues that, at some point in the early 20th century, American architecture got turned upside down. Before, wealthy clients called the shots, commissioning buildings brimming with extravagance and ornament to match their own larger-than-lifeness. After, they were made supplicant to the towering egos of the new artist-architects, themselves in thrall to European intellectual fads premised upon the preposterous notion that the architect knew better than the client not just what they wanted, but what they needed.

What they needed, in this case, being austerity, angularity, flatnesss; a sort of monolithism. Wolfe bemoans all the Seagram Buildings that, at least in the early eighties, he seems to have felt rising all around, enclosing him in a circle of oppressive starkness. Easy to give him that, except he spins his aesthetic preference into a paranoid tale of a blinkered intelligentsia beneath which cower American businesses — where the real work happens — and the American common man — the engine of the real real work — alike.

These are ancient incantations, and I have to imagine they were at least a little weary in 1981. A lot of people hate, or profess to hate, modern architecture, and I’m sure there’s plenty interesting to be written about that. But for some reason, the people who actually take up the cause always seem to be polemicists of one kind or another. Wolfe, who converts his distaste into a grand narrative, is more benign than many; though irritating, that’s still pretty much the jaywalking of intellectual crimes. The increasingly nutty, apocalyptic manifestos issued by, say, Prince Charles, are another matter. I do find some of his urban planning principles desirable — I enjoy an unseparated mixture of housing, commerce, and industry, though I don’t know that I’d move to Poundbury to get it — but he suffers the same malady as most high-profile enemies of modern architecture: atrocious taste. The alternatives the anti-modernists propose aren’t always as bad as Prince Charles’ 1920 England by way of Disneyland, but they’re always worse than modernism.

But then, these big arguments about the fate/destiny/mandate of architecture all boil mostly down to taste, don’t they? I happen to like modern architecture, even straight-up Bauhaus; Wolfe doesn’t. De gustibus non disputandum est. He does reference the common argument that unlike, say, paintings, architecture affects everyone who walks by buildings, and thus should be designed to popular taste, which feels like it should be more convincing than I actually find it. Here the conversation turns to that eternal struggle, the slobs versus the snobs. How large-scale 20th-century efforts to improve the lot of the working class came to be bitterly resented by same, how a seemingly endless array of noble projects all devolved into Caddyshack, remains, for me, one of the fascinating historical questions going, not that this book addresses it in much depth.

I admit that, for all the pleasure I take from the sort of architecture Wolfe bemoans — the International Style, a favorite of mine, gets an especially extended whipping — it does have roots in a truly ugly ideology. Though it’s far more often attempted than accomplished, I find the top-down imposition of collective behavior abhorrent. I can’t deny that these architects whose aesthetics I greatly admire wanted to build “machines for living,” treating lives as ants in a farm to be redirected at the flighty will of theory. I feel a little like Bryan Ferry saying those Nazis might have been wrong about a lot of things, but boy, look at that style.

Anyway, From Bauhaus to Our House is wrong about a lot of things, but boy, look at that cover design.