Locating Architecture: Writing, Drawing and Building Mexico City, 1938-1964

All Soul’s College, Oxford

Dr Adam Kaasa, an interdisciplinary scholar who specialises in the politics of the city, is presenting a paper which attends to the rhetorical registers of writing, drawing and building through key moments in the work of the Mexican architect Mario Pani. He will analyse an archive of material that moves from Pani’s co-founding of the journal Arquitectura/México in 1938, to the construction of the Centro Urbano Presidente Alemán, a modernist housing estate in Mexico City in 1949, to the work of his Taller de Urbanismo (Urban Studio) between 1946 and 1964.

Within the context of emerging scholarship that rearticulates colonial circulations of urban planning and architecture within a framework of multiple or alternative modernities, he will emphasise an attention to the co-constitution of writing, drawing and building, and their role in assembling the urban.