Mexico City After the Earthquake

...The tourists, for example, stayed in their hotel corridors, sleeping on sofas and armchairs, during the three nights following the tremor...

...The difference was significant...

...The inadequate safety precautions and the artistic charlatanism which it revealed are discouraging evidence that human wisdom does not keep pace with technological progress...

...They did so not to protect themselves but to pray and to submit to what the deeply religious Mexican lower classes call the "will of God"—which, in reality, means to them the will of vast forces which they cannot comprehend...

...The result: After the earthquake, the streets of this city were littered with the debris of these ornaments...

...The latter, as always in such cases, went out in the street...

...Buildings like the new Torre de la Latino-Americana and the National Lottery (a monument in stone to the importance of gambling in Mexican life) survived the recent quake intact, while others, not built on jacks, cracked from top to bottom and will have to be torn down...

...The streets are uneven, and when a new building is put up the smaller structures alongside it tend to rise and develop cracks under the pressure...

...Recently, some skyscrapers have been constructed on enormous hydraulic jacks which raise or lower them in accordance with the ground level...

...With the passage of years and the saturation of the market by their works, this monopolistic group has lost ground...

...Mexico City rests on a porous subsoil, and water had to be pumped out before any building was possible...

...For the past several decades, Mexico City has been the victim of a colossal artistic fraud...

...Architects' reputations revised Mexico City After the Quake By Victor Alba Mexico City A lady i know described the July 27 earthquake here—the most severe in modern times—in the following words: "I woke up with a feeling of nausea and heartburn, and I thought, 'Good God, I'm pregnant again.'" An American student wrote to her family that "the trees were dancing the cha-cha...

...The rich, on the other hand, remained indoors in an effort to protect themselves...

...By definition, an architect is supposed to concern himself above all with the safety of the structures he is erecting...

...In order to recoup, they have had to resort to various tricks in the search for new material...

...True, there were a good many broken dishes and window-panes, and cases of beds sliding across the room...

...As a result of the tremor, several modern buildings were left temporarily uninhabitable and another collapsed, with the loss of some 30 lives...

...This movement has also gained control of architecture...

...In actual fact, the people of Mexico City are so accustomed to seeing quakes neutralized by the spongy subsoil on which this capital is built that they were not particularly alarmed...

...The Independence Monument lost its "angel," which toppled over and was decapitated in the process...

...A group of artists, chiefly painters, have dominated the market and imposed their point of view...

...Some are trying to halt the settling of existing buildings by pumping water into the subsoil, while others are looking for methods of preventing new construction from sinking...

...Had the quake hit during the daytime, when the streets were filled with people, the casualties inflicted by "plastic integration" would have been considerable...

...They have taken to speaking about "plastic integration" and mingling sculpture and painting in the same work of art —a procedure that would be permissible in expressing something which required this fusion but instead has served to lend an appearance of novelty to utterly banal works...

...One striking aspect of the earthquake was the difference in behavior between the wealthy classes—including American tourists—and the poor...

...Certain buildings, such as the Palace of Fine Arts—a ghastly marble-and-bronze monstrosity from the beginning of this century—have sunk so far that half of the first floor is below ground level...

...The subsoil problem and the constant expansion and population growth of the city (from 500,000 in 1910 to 4 million in 1957) have forced architects and engineers to seek new solutions...

...The result is that the land is sinking at the rate of a foot-and-a-half annually...

...They have promoted the careers of mediocre artists who could pose no threat to their own position, and condemned to silence, neglect and loneliness those talented people who refused to submit to their sterile standards...

...All in all, if the Mexican earthquake was not a material catastrophe, it was a spiritual catastrophe for those who pondered its lessons...

...The basic need here, as perhaps in contemporary civilization as a whole, is for a greater concern by technologists for the basic needs of human beings...

...To the average impoverished Mexican, life obviously seemed a far less valuable possession than to the relatively limited class of the well-to-do...

...Mexican architects, however, have in recent years been adorning the fronts of buildings with mosaics, cement slabs, etc.—an application to their field of so-called "plastic integration...

...even the use of hydraulic jacks in tall buildings was due to economic considerations (the rise in the price of land caused a trend to skyscrapers, which could not be built unless the problem of land settling was solved) and not to a desire to minimize earthquake damage...

...The earthquake has also raised some interesting questions in another field...

...But it was not until the following morning, upon reading the newspapers, that the people realized that they had lived through a serious earthquake which would have caused a catastrophe had the city been built on firm ground...

...Indeed...

...When there is an earthquake, the building rocks to and fro, but without collapsing or cracking...