Page 151 - Libro Max Cetto

Max Cetto: Architect and Historiographer of Mexican Modernity Daniel Escotto

Poelzig; this foray into theater and film was characteristic of Poelzig, as he designed the sets
for the film Der Golem (Paul Wegener, 1920). Poelzig worked designing sets, primarily for
Shakespeare plays and Mozart operas, from 1920 and 1926. This was the period in which
Max Cetto was closest to his master Hans Poelzig, which would leave a major mark upon
his life; Cetto’s thesis project in Berlin was for a theater. Cetto decided not to go to the
Bauhaus because, in those years (from 1922 on), the structure of the school barely included
architecture in its curriculum.

Das Neue Frankfurt and the New Objectivity

In the 1920s and 1930s, architecture began to be considered just one element within the
ideology of city planning, in which “architecture and urbanism would have to be the objects
”7
and not the subjects of the Plan. The role of architecture should then be political. Le Cor-
busier had already posed the question “Architecture or Revolution?” The Neue Sachlichkeit
interposed the form of design –contrary to the ideology of the avant-garde– as a production
line that began with a standardized element, followed by the cell –the room was considered
8
to be an elementary cell by Ludwig Hilberseimer in Großstadtarchitektur (1927) – the hous-
ing block and, finally, the city. The exact resolution of any element within this production
“line” tended to disappear or, rather, be incorporated into the whole. “The cell is not only the
prime element of the continuous production line that concludes with the city, but it is also
9
the element that conditions the dynamics of the aggregations of building structures.” The
architect thus became only a coordinator, an organizer of this production cycle.
It is under this ideological line, identified with those groups of intellectuals in which
architectural ideology was defined under a technical concept, such as the Novembergruppe
or Der Ring, and as part of the pact of left-wing radicals with the newly-formed Weimar
Republic, that cities came to be administered under the social democracy of postwar Ger-
many: in Berlin, Martin Wagner; in Hamburg, Fritz Schumacher; and in Frankfurt am
Main, Ernst May. The latter, an architect trained under the conceptions of the Garden City,
headed the Department of Urban Planning and Public Works of the city of Frankfurt am
Main between 1925 and 1930, while the period of recovery from the war occurred from
1919 to 1922, approximately. At the time, the highest demand in Germany was for housing.
By 1923, the country was beginning to recover economically and politically and loans were
nearly paid off before they were due. This made it possible for Frankfurt Mayor Landmann
to propose to May in 1925 what would be a project without precedents: the construction
of 15,000 homes between 1925 and 1930. There had been an immediate antecedent to the
Siedlungen (workers, housing complexes) of the Neues Bauen (new construction): Bruno
Taut and Martin Wagner had built the Hufeisensiedlung in Berlin; J.J.P. Oud built the Tus-
schendyken workers, colony (1919-1920) in Rotterdam, which Giedion would declare to be
“the beginning of a synthesis between the social and aesthetic aspects of the new housing
10
movement”; and Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer built the Dessau-Törten (1926-1928):

7 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia (Boston: MIT Press, 1976).
8 As Ludwig Hilberseimer wrote in his 1927 Großstadtarchitektur, “The architecture of the large city depends essentially
on the resolution given to two factors: the elementary cell and the urban organism as a whole. The single room as the
constituent element of the habitation will determine the aspect of the habitation, and since the habitations in turn
form blocks, the room will become a factor of urban configuration, which is architecture’s true goal. Reciprocally, the
planimetric structure of the city will have a substantial influence on the design of the habitation and the room.”
9 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia.
10 Susanne Dussel Peters, Max Cetto (1903-1980) Arquitecto mexicano-alemán (Mexico City: UAM, 1995).

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