Page 167 - Libro Max Cetto

In Cetto’s Proximity Bettina Cetto

Fig. 12 Interior, apartment at Río Pánuco 199, 1940 and today. Photos: Max Cetto and Bettina Cetto.

Fig. 11 Interior, apartment at Río Pánuco 199, 1940. © Archivo Max Cetto, UAM Azcapotzalco, Mexico.

The collaboration with Jorge Rubio during his early Mexican period is, as Humberto
13
Ricalde points out, the most extensive, with easily a dozen houses and other buildings. By
January 1940, they finished the design for the San José Purúa Hotel and Spa in Jungapeo,
Michoacán. As Cetto recounted in a late interview with Lilia Gómez:

The Enríquez family had given us a week to do the hotel project. We spent a few days
in San José Purúa, touring those beautiful landscapes and, after several sleepless nights,
we submitted the project with the budget and everything… the terrain was so rugged,
the landscape so beautiful and our project suited it so very well, accommodating itself
to the grounds. What we did was draw up the project on site, incorporating the local
ecology and then plotting the preliminary draft; this project was thus not planned in
the atelier, but on the grounds themselves. This has been my construction philosophy. 14
13 Ricalde, Max Cetto, Vida y obra, 24.
14 Gómez, “Entrevista,” 119.

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