Conjunto Urbano Nonalco Tlatelolco Housing Complex - Mario Pani (Mexico City, 1960s)
Scene of the final brutal conquest of the Aztecs, the massacre of protesters ahead of the 1968 Olympic Games and the collapse of an entire housing block in the 1985 earthquake, Tlatelolco embodies Mexico’s painful history.
Today a district of Mexico City, Tlatelolco began as a city-state on the shore of Lake Texcoco, eventually overtaken by the ascendant Aztecs, who made it a part of their empire. During the brutal conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés, in 1521 Tlatelolco was the site of the last battle between the Aztecs and the Spanish conquistadors. In the battle, Cortés triumphed, and some 40,000 Aztecs were killed. Centuries later, a plaque would be built on the site that reads: “The battle was not a triumph, nor was it a defeat. It was the painful birth of the mestizo nation that is the Mexico of today.”
The deaths of the battle left a scar on the national psyche of the new colony, and later Mexico. The Spaniards did their best to pave over Tlatelolco’s dark history, demolishing its temple and using the stones to build a church. Much later, in the 1950s, Mexican leaders resolved to finally right the wrongs suffered on the site, putting it to good use by building a modern housing project there. It was claimed that the complex would improve the lives of its inhabitants through the virtues of modern design.
By the 1950s, Mexico City was facing a serious housing shortage. Seeking to address this issue, the Mexican government sought to implement the most innovative building design of the time. They contracted Mario Pani, a young architect who had become one of the biggest proponents of the modernist ideas of Le Corbusier in the country.
His plan called for 102 residential towers, ranging in height from four to 22 floors, placed in large blocks with plazas and public space in between – Le Corbusier’s “towers in the park” concept. Additionally, the area near the recently excavated ruins of the former Tlatelolco temple and the Spanish church would be converted into a plaza, named Plaza de las Tres Culturas (“Square of the Three Cultures”, after the Aztecs, Spain and Mexico).
Though part of the plan’s rationale was to provide an economical solution to the housing crisis, it also claimed to improve the lives of the inhabitants of the complex, through the virtues of modern design. Pani believed that the complex would be part of a “general process of regeneration”. Far from achieving these lofty goals, the complex instead set the stage for the next instalment in Tlatelolco’s tragic history.
In 1968, Mexico City was preparing to host the Olympics. While the government saw the event as a way to raise Mexico’s stature in the eyes of the world, a coalition of left-leaning activists instead wanted to turn attention to social ills and the frequently violent overreach of military forces in Mexico. In response, the government created the Olympia battalion, a paramilitary squad intended to ensure the games wouldn’t be interrupted by protesters.
The protests reached tipping point on 2 October, 10 days before the opening ceremony, when protesters gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the late afternoon for a rally. At the same time, snipers from the battalion took strategic posts in the new housing complexes, providing them with a clear shot on the people below.
At 6:10pm, a shot was fired, though no one was sure where it came from. Security forces acted immediately, opening fire on the protesters. “At that point,” journalist Elena Poniatowska wrote in her book The Night of Tlatelolco, “the Plaza de las Tres Culturas became a living hell.”
After the killings ended, the government’s initial reaction was to minimise the carnage, estimating that only 24 had been killed. This figure was dramatically contradicted by other accounts. Poniatowska’s account includes an interview with a mother living in Tlatelolco who claims to have seen at least 65 dead bodies during the massacre.
The tragic events that night left a lasting legacy and remain a hot topic in Mexican politics. Alongside the plaque to the 1521 defeat of the Aztecs, another was placed to the memory of the student demonstrators. But though the events were seen as an indictment of the Mexican government, they didn’t tarnish the reputation of the Tlatelolco complex itself. Two decades later, another tragedy would occur at the site that would do just that.
On the morning of 9 September 1985, Mexico was hit by an 8.1 magnitude earthquake. Though the epicentre was off the coast of the southwest state of Michoacán, it was powerful enough to cause major damage in Mexico City, demolishing buildings, damaging metro stations and killing thousands.
The Tlatelolco complex was hit particularly hard. Two of the three segments of the Nuevo León building collapsed, killing all residents inside. The collapse, exacerbated by a toxic combination of cost cutting during the original construction and improper maintenance, left between 200 and 300 dead.
Due to earthquake damage, eight other buildings in the complex were demolished and four more had their uppermost floors removed. It was an event charged with symbolism. Just as Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis, Missouri had demonstrated the “death of modernism” in the United States, the partial demolition of Tlatelolco showed it to be a failure south of the border as well.
But the downfall of modernism at Tlatelolco may also represent the rise of a new trend in housing, with a uniquely Latin American twist. This change is at the centre of the argument made by architecture critic Justin McGuirk in his recent book Radical Cities. McGuirk sees the decline of Tlatelolco as coinciding with the beginning of a new movement he calls “activist architecture”.