Ground and underground architecture: Metro Line 1 stations
Mexico City has a buried past and a present that moves and throbs also from its bowels, the subway network, an underworld that from the depths observes the coming and going of inhabitants who come from all points of the great capital. More than a means of transport it is a vital flow: without the metro, the city simply becomes paralyzed. But this was not always the case, and this entry addresses the history of such public transport from its origins. With these lines we join the 50th metro party, loved by many and hated by so many others, but certainly recognized as an integral part of the capital.
On Thursday, September 4, 1969, Mexico City became the 39th capital of the world to have an underground train, in addition, it received worldwide recognition through the International Metropolitan Committee, for having overcome all difficulties built in record time in a subsoil estimated by the World Congress of Soil Mechanics, as the most difficult in the world. The phrase "Technique, Beauty and Imagination" was the motto with which the Mexican State presented the new work that was considered "symbol of progress, audacity, comfort and comfort". Built for the capital, it seemed that the underground lines marked the future of the great city.
Although talks on the project to build the Metro began in 1966, the original idea emerged from 1958 thanks to the initiative of the engineer Bernardo Quintana, mandamás at that time of the construction company ICA. However, it was only after the resignation of Ernesto P. Uruchurtu as Head of the Department of the Federal District and the arrival in office of Alfonso Corona del Rosal, that the possibility of building it in the Mexican capital was formally reconsidered. It was then thought that the DDF should absorb the total cost of civil works, for which a loan of French origin was obtained, a country that also provided technology and advice for its construction.
Unsurprisingly, it was ICA who took charge of the work but Bernardo Quintana chose Angel Borja Navarrete as the head of the project. It is said that on the day they obtained the contract for the Metro, Quintana and Borja reached an agreement: if they wanted to meet in time and cost with the difficult order, they should avoid the difficulties that would bring the stations to order the stations to different offices of architects, both for the stylistic unity required by the system, as for the difficulty of controlling various and connotated artistic personalities.
Borja then decided to work with what he called the "seed team" of young architects, with which the best results could be obtained away from the risks of the role of "author". As most would be underground stations and only a couple would be in sight, it was decided that for these only cases the architects Salvador Ortega Flores and Félix Candela should be convened. For the stations that would be located on the tlalpan road, a unitary expression was needed as they would be different from the rest, so Enrique del Moral was summoned. To complete, advice on colors and materials from Luis Barragán was also required. These were the only commissions that were made outside the team, but always under the direction of Borja Navarrete.
The choice of materials for the work was governed by the double criterion of functionality and plastic value. They were considered to be domestically produced and easy to acquire, resistant to rough use and pleasant expression, outside the fashions of the moment. With this in mind, the creation of new architectural forms fused with the technology of the time that provided automatic doors, electric stairs, turnstiles for passenger counting, etc., including the modern trains that carried capitals to a dream place from the bowels of their own city.
Within these new forms, Felix Candela's hyperbolic paraboloid was one of the most remarkable structures. Located in the candelaria, Merced and San Lázaro stations, some specialists agree that the most impressive are those of this last season. Candela used low-cost, sustainable materials to cover as much space as possible with as few parts as possible. In the Merced and Candelaria stations, the structures are seen in fine series that cover the accesses, creating in turn generous spaces for the transit of passengers.
But it is likely that the most remarkable station of this first line was that of Insurgentes. Georgina Cebey, when she talks about this structure, interprets the Mayan inscriptions on the stone wall that guards the entrance, such as the transmission of the weight of the millennial past through them and their confrontation with the white marble plates of the facade that they function as the prologue to the subtle presence of modernity. "Inside, the corridors of the platforms maintain the Mayan hieroglyphics while the columns are covered with stone reliefs in which plant elements corresponding to colonial images are observed, similar to those of the convents as in the 16th century held hybrid representations between the European and the indigenous." Thus, the station functions as a kind of mausoleum dedicated to the preservation of the national tradition: the transport of the future joins the corridors of yesterday.
The Metro showed modern architecture that handled indigenous elements, full of color, platforms where marble and tecali came to be combined, Mexican rose, turquoise blue, technology at the service of a village with ancestral past, the succession of roofs of Candela to get to a place as traditional as the Merced market. While there was no prominence in architecture, the vision and style of some of the collaborators inevitably stood out. But this did not become an obstacle, it was something more spontaneous that did not alter the whole set. Despite the passage of time, the deterioration, of the crowds that now seize their corridors and trains, of the difficulties that passengers face to enter and leave, to circulate, to inhabit this space, the structures remain as witnesses of that day when it seemed that the inhabitants of the city, boarded a vehicle that would transport them to the same moon.
by Paulina Martínez Figueroa