Page 145 - Libro Max Cetto

Cristina López Uribe and Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez

of everything: the title, cover, jacket, typography, layout and printing: “Perfectionism finally
finds its reward.” 73

Das Ende

A year before he died in 1979, our author published a new version of his essay in the
74
magazine Arquitecto, edited by Carlos Somorrostro. In the two decades since it was first
published, the world of architecture had changed considerably. Robert Venturi and Denisse
Scott Brown had published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from
Las Vegas, which attacked the discipline’s intellectual elitism and opened the eyes of archi-
tects to how popular culture operates in all spheres of society, while Manfredo Tafuri had
destroyed the last hopes on modern architecture, proposing, alongside his colleagues in
Venice, a radical critique of the capitalist city based on a new historical materialism.
Perhaps because of the social and cultural crises of the 1960s, Cetto refrained from
publishing in Arquitecto the fragment of his essay explaining the basic theory behind his
arguments, and perhaps its usefulness had also begun to fade in the strained atmosphere of
the Cold War. Either way, the rest of Cetto’s ideas remained strong, as the most sophisticat-
ed Mexican magazine of the time –conceptually and materially– republished them almost
in their entirety. Our architect, author, editor and photographer, that is, our man of letters,
thus passed away with the certainty that his Modern Architecture in Mexico would pass down
a series of values and critical tools that, like the humanism that structured his intellectual
discourse, would sketch the outline of a better world for generations to come.

73 Letter from Cetto to Hatje, December 14, 1960 (AMCC).
74 Max Cetto “Arquitectura moderna en México,” Arquitecto, year 4, No. 14 (Sept-Oct 1979), 12-27.

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