An unappreciated past: the Chrysler Automex Factory and the built heritage of the twentieth century

As Sigfried Giedion says in the book space, Time and architecture, there is a big problem in our contemporary culture: the widespread disregard for the immediate past makes buildings of great importance to be demolished without regard. There is no particular interest in what is being destroyed because there is no valuation of the cultural products closest to us, unfortunately, the case of the Chrysler factory is just one more example of artistic, historical and architectural heritage, Reduced to pieces of concrete and twisted rods.

 

This time we have to recover a bit of the history of a building that we lost in the year 2004 and say we lost because unfortunately, when this kind of thing happens, the loss must be felt by all Mexicans in general. In the year of its demolition, researcher Maria Bustamante Harfush raised her voice through some articles about the imminent destruction of the Chrysler factory, the work of the architects Guillermo Rosell and Lorenzo Carrasco built in the year 1952. But this did not slow down the craving for the piece of the square footage and in a way other than fast, a work that was to be protected as an artistic, historical and architectural heritage was reduced to pieces of concrete and twisted rods.

At the end of the thirties, the road-building and roads policy began approximately ten years earlier. The ease of installation of industries increased and the need for transport for a rapidly growing city was increasingly pressing. Faced with this scenario that posed to the automobile as a viable solution for the mobility throughout the country, in 1938 Gastón Azcárraga Vidaurreta and a group of businessmen decided to found Automex S.A. With Mexican capital and assistance from Chrysler Corporation based in Detroit, Michigan in the United States. The plant inaugurated at that time was located to the west of Mexico City in what is now the Anahuac colony and occupied a built area of 8169 square meters.

But the business was successful and the monthly production of vehicles increased so that at the beginning of the fifties it was decided to make a remodeling and enlargement of the plant installed in the number 320 of the street Lago Alberto. It was commissioned to the architects Guillermo Rosell and Lorenzo Carrasco who, as happened with the young architects of his time, eagerly sought the expression of a modern Mexican architecture. Some found it in the so-called plastic integration movement, which sought to create a total work by bringing together in the same building various artistic manifestations.

In the case of the Automex factory, the architects requested their collaboration from the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, who made an exterior mural on the main façade; The engraver Leopoldo Méndez, who was in charge of making a plastic engraving that was installed in the main vestibule of the office building; To the photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo who made a photomontage for the boardroom; And to the designer Clara Porset, who furnished the main offices of the building. In this way, they created a building that was a sample of the artistic and architectural tendencies of their time and that also responded to the needs of a particular company and of an industry in general that were in the process of expansion.

Attached to the car assembly plant was also built the new building for the offices of Automex that previously were housed within the general body of the plant. But it also gathered the offices corresponding to the commercial finance, an organism that offered facilities for the purchase and sale of cars. Thus, the project comprised three plants with a total area of 1950 square meters. All the heavy machinery was placed on the ground floor as well as the workshops of the printing and bookbinding, switches, the IBM department and a School of service and training to teach workers without experience.

It counted equally with a classroom-auditorium for 180 spectators which was also used for the school of Service and which had a modern system of projection. The plant was completed with a covered parking lot for 10 cars, service access and two main lobbies that even allowed the permanent exhibition of the new car models. The facades were distinguished by their simple strokes that accentuated the horizontality of the general body. In the upper part, the roof of the last floor, treated with some movement, helped by contrast, to affirm the severity of the rest of the whole.

It was in the year 2004 when the demolition of this plant began to give place to a large mixed complex of housing of medium and high interest, developed in several towers of 30 levels. The possibility of changing the use of land from industrial to residential has caused the dismantling of industries in colonies such as irrigation or Anahuac, also transforming an immense area of estates within Mexico City. It seems that the institutions in charge of their protection do not provide for daily care, the large number of buildings of architectural, artistic and historical value that we have in this city, all coupled with the corruption prevailing in the Authorities, causes situations like the one we live with this plant.

And that is what we face with many buildings built throughout the twentieth century. The temporal proximity to our present makes these constructions are not valued as it is done with the previous centuries (XVI-XIX) although they are equal and in some cases I daresay that more important in the absence of other sources that explain certain Issues and processes that directly affect the current society. Within these buildings, it is logical that those dedicated to industry and the company are even less protected by the symbolic and emotive burden they represent. Serve these lines to draw attention to this scenario and invite everyone to be interested in the architectural heritage of the twentieth century Mexican, which still has much to say.

 

by Paulina Martínez