The UNAM campus south of Mexico City is so much more than its famous O’Gorman murals. Walking around the campus designed nearly 70 years ago at the height of modernism architecture is like seeing the best ideals of this architectural movement unfold in front your eyes - abstract yet humanistic, geometrically bold yet woven with nature - a total sense of openness, permeability, and inter-connecvtivity.
Although almost all of the buildings bear marks of their time - single pane glass, decaying masonry walls, and stained concrete pilotis - the spaces both indoor and outdoor seem to work just as they were envisioned. Students do all sorts of things - in the open courtyards, under the pavilions and walkways, around the many in between spaces - eating, playing, making out, debating, and protesting. The local lava rock is used throughout the campus as walls and pavers, giving a particular character to each of the spaces while unifying the entire campus. The overarching grid of grass and cement form the outdoor carpet for the center of the campus. Together with generous stairs and garden walls, this grid beautifully negotiates the changing levels and the undulating terrain. It was particularly important for me to expose the rigor of this haven of modernist buildings - spatial parallels, alignments, and centering. The indigenous planting helps soften such rigorous volumes of spaces. As a result, the geometric abstraction of the architecture is perfectly married to the figures in nature, giving the campus a fresh sense of space and humanity - a quality that is often times missing in pure modernist works.
