Architecture of Resistance [Housing]

1) Kenneth Frampton. Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six points for an architecture of resistance, in Foster H. (ed). The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend: Bay Press, (1983), pp. 16-30.
2) Keith L. Eggener. Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism, Journal of Architectural Education, (2002), pp. 228-237.
3) Elena Tames, Use, Appropriation and Personalization of Space in Mexican Housing Projects and Informal Settlements, TDSR Volume XV Number II, (2004), pp. 33-48.

Mexico City, with a population of over 19.2 million people is the largest metropolitan area in the western hemisphere and the second largest in the world after Tokyo, There is a grate need for housing in the area and for those who can not afford typical ways of getting a home have other options, applying to programs to get a low cost house which manly are build by housing institutions in cheap land and with standard materials making all the housing units look the same and therefore not letting the owners to have a real identification with there home. The other way is trough informal settlements on government owned land, here the owner builds his one home with whatever materials he can get, and trough time he will build a home he can proudly call as his one.

In her essay Elena Tames analyses four of this projects in Mexico City two informal settlements in the hills of the Ajusco, (Dos de Octubre and Lomas Altas de Padierna) and two housing projects in the area of Cuautitlan, (San Pablo Tultepec and La Palma) which is a plain land far from the city center.

During the 1950’s government sponsored competitions in Mexico develop urban and housing projects to accommodate the rapid grow of the city architects such as Mario Pani and Jose Villagran Garcia designed and construct many of this projects all do the project Dos de Octubre is not designed by any of these two architects it is one of the projects build during the 1950’s by the government.

In the other hand the La Palma project was build by private housing institutions during the 1990’s these housing institutions have been transformed into a financial entities due to the high government-sponsored low-income housing. The importance of these is that as Elena Tames mentions the second project has a more innovating design, by not copying the superblocks and multifamily apartment ideas derived from the modern architecture movement, but at the same time still has a lot of flaws, they have no flexibility and no sense of identity, because the project consist mainly of repeating the same house or unit as many number of times as you can fit on the land destined for the project, with no possibility of expansion in a cheap land far from jobs and the city center. The informal settlements houses which have no infrastructure but as it is being built over time by the owner he can adequate the project to better fit his needs therefore having more flexibility and identity, Eggener while defining Critical Regionalism quotes Lewis Mumford book The South in Architecture (1941). “Regionalism, is not a matter of using the most available local material, or copying some simple form of construction that our ancestors used, for what of anything better, a century or two ago. Regional forms are those which most closely meet the actual conditions of life and which most fully succeed in making a people feel at home in their environment: they do not merely utilize the soil but they reflect the current conditions of culture in the region” .

Thinking of the housing projects and informal settlements in Mexico in terms of Critical Regionalism, the housing projects built by financial entities will have a lack of cultural and regional identity as being a mass production of housing with standardized materials in big flat parts of the city, Frampton mentions that bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a tectonic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, therefore not only are these projects uncultural but also have a sense of placelessness, Whereas the informal settlements being built on hills have engaged in the act of cultivating the site terracing the site to receive the stepped form of a building.

While during de 1950’s architects were more concern in building low cost infrastructure and housing projects architect Luis Baragan speculated in real state, the houses and gardens he built in Gardens of El Pedregal had a relationship with de site by ad equating the vegetation and volcanic rock indigenous to the site with the project, these project is mention in Eggener essay and is described as to have a marked contrast to the more obvious, exuberant, populist notions of modern Mexican architectural identity. The project of El Pedregal was a highly advertised housing project especially outside Mexico but it was not a low income development it was in the entire contrary, a very high income design with exclusionary subdivisions and walled gardens. In a post-Revolutionary Mexico this was a very conscience-pricking action. And this action says Eggener makes Barragan’s notion of critical regionalism as an essential radical project.

In one hand we have the informal settlements with a high sense of identity because it is constructed and materialized buy the people to satisfy there one needs these being, economical religious an cultural making these settlements a contemporary place-oriented culture. In the other hand we have the low income housing projects built by institutions supported by the government in a mass production systems building around 430,000 units in a year therefore losing all regional and cultural identity making them an impact of universal civilization in the city and the basic way of generating housing in Mexico. But we also have projects like El Pedregal a critique to all built and design to accommodate de elite in a city were the elite are just a few and the rest is many. Even if the informal settlements are not design buy architects and are not esthetical projects, they do cultivate de idea of critical regionalism in Mexico City; Frampton mention that “critical regionalism is contingent upon a process of double meditation. In the first palace it has to deconstruct the overall spectrum of world culture which it inevitably inherits, the second place, it has to achieve, through synthetic contradiction, a manifest critique of universal civilization” .

In a urbanize populace which has paradoxically lost the object of its urbanization as Frampton wrote, these settlements are illegal constructed in mountains and hills surrounding the city they do not have infrastructure or anything else but they do have the ability of improvement over time and to transform there fiscal appetence and become part of the city. The housing institution projects can’t improve once they have been they show no real concern of urbanization just a rapid way of building houses and they will become obsolete for the families that while living there became a larger family and now have no space for all of them or improve there economical income and prefer to live in a place near the city with a home that looks and feels like they do, as Barragan said Mexican architecture must have a “sentimental embracing” .


El Pedregal Is a project that can and has transform over time and adapt to the new needs of the city and to become a much more dense area buy building 4 or 5 homes were there used to be just one, and by chancing zoning laws to accommodate commerce in the main streets, not only is El Padregal a project design by an architect but it is also a project in constant chancing and transformation that emphasizes the changes in the city therefore moving along culturally with the city’s identity.

It is important for architects to understand the benefits that the informal settlements give to the low income housing in Mexico and to the people that will live in them, and at the same time it is also important to adequate mass produce housing projects to better feat those needs, to understand the background so to make a much better cultural identity designs that people will appropriate as there one making the project not only a successful business but also a successful place to live, if as Frampton mentions Critical Regionalism is a process and not an idea then the process in which the informal settlement are being design (not by architects) its more regional than any of the big commercial housing projects and an has more identity with the culture and values of low income Mexican families, so architects planning housing projects should look at these examples as a guide into create new projects, to make of Mexico a more place-oriented culture and not a placelessness city.