MXDF STUDIO 2007 Xochimilco, Mexico City: 2007/02

Objectives
The MXDF studio aims at exploring how the physical, and conceptual understanding of landscape can enrich current forms of architectural and urban design practice. We will introduce landscape and infrastructure discourses that increasingly impinge on the fields of architecture and urban design today. At the junction of landform, infrastructure, urban design and architecture lies a rich field of possibilities that is increasingly superseding the narrower field of each of the disciplines by themselves.

Site
The studio will work in the Xochimilco area of Mexico City that is well known for its extended series of canals - all that remains of the ancient system of lakes stretching for most of the valley of Anahuac in the middle of which Tenochtitlan the impressive capital of the Aztecs was located. Drained originally by the conquistadors to reproduce the conditions found most commonly in Spain, the lakebed is occupied almost entirely by Mexico city. The loss of the subterranean water has produced an ecological disaster including, the gradual sinking of large parts of the city, loss of habitat, native vegetation and traditional sound agricultural methods to cultivate in the middle of the water called chinampas.
Often referred to, incorrectly, as “floating gardens”, the chinampas were stationary artificial islands that were created by staking out the shallow lake bed and then fencing in the rectangle with wattle. The fenced-off area was then layered with mud, lake sediment, and decaying vegetation, eventually bringing it above the level of the lake. Chinampas were separated by channels wide enough for a canoe to pass
Xochimilco is today a deteriorating area that lives under the constant threat of losing its distinctiveness with the growing relentless advance of the capital city and the pollution of the waters. In spite of the bad situation movies such as Maria Candelaria (1940), directed by Emilio Fernandez Romo have promoted the romantic reputation of the area.

Xochimilco Archeological Site Museum and Ecological Park
The worsening situation has generated a demand to conserve the landscapes and artifacts in Xochimilco while integrating them to the needs of modern society .The creation of Archeological Site Museum and Ecological Park is seen as an important instrument to advance this goal.

Archeology portrays culture as a set of actions made by man to transform his environment; sacred objects, irrigation ditches, fields or defensive moats all have the same cultural significance. Archeology needs to be seen within the context of the man-nature relationship but it has tended instead to conserve and display objects based on their aesthetic values. The MXDF studio will argue that the integration of nature (however artificial) to the economic and social aspects of any given area are relevant to the understanding of culture. The museum program therefore aims at handling archeology in a non-aesthetic way, not as an agglomeration of “objects” of contemplation but instead comprehensively as part of a larger environment.

While you will decide whether to design separate rooms/gardens/ greenhouses to house and or to design a museum as a hybrid based on a combination of strategies, you are asked in all cases to act as curator and collector in addition to being the architect. The museum will be structured around the exhibit of archeological artifacts from Xochimilco that you will research and distribute in space. In addition you should consider lobby spaces, restrooms, workrooms as well as a greenhouse and botanical Garden that will exhibit plants from Xochimilco and the rest of Mexico.

The 76,000 square feet, museum should combine the most advanced structural, material, environmental knowledge to provide a comfortable environment for scholars and visitors. Include support spaces for loading, storage, administration, conservation and photography along with a multipurpose room for both lectures and seated dinners.

Precedents
Kevin Roche’s Oakland Museum of California was designed as a series of low level concrete structures covering a four block area, on three levels, the terrace of each level forming the roof of the one below — a museum with a park on its roof was an innovative solution that became kind of a non-building or a building were landscape and architecture merged eliminating the distinction between the two, to the point where the building lost a presence in the city.

Herzog deMeuron designed DeYoung Museum could arguably be seen as positioning itself ambiguously as an object and a landscape. Both as a form and in its skin patterns the building mimicks and subtly adjust to the surrounding landscape while its floor plan intertwines courtyards and galleries.

Finally the Museo Nacional Antropológico of Mexico by Pedro Ramirez Vázquez gives the outside space an interior character by covering, the courtyard with the enormous concrete umbrella.

Exchange
The studio is going to develop the Archeological Museum program in simultaneity with students from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and advanced Studio students from CCA in San Francisco. Mid-review will take place in conjunction with CCA students. Mexican students will come to Berkeley for final reviews. Walter Hood’s studio at the landscape department will also travel to Mexico and we expect further exchanges to happen within internal College context.

Visit
We will be traveling to visit Mexico from the 8th-15 January to research the area, understand social political and environmental circumstances and meet Mexican students, architects and landscape designers. The department will cover the costs of the equivalent of the cheapest return to air -fare (the exact number will depend on the number of students that will join the studio). There might be some additional subsidy for accommodation. An additional trip to Oaxaca.( 5hr beautiful bus ride) to visit the historical town and botanical gardens will depend on the political situation of the area.

We will schedule visits to the Museo Nacional de Antropologia of 1964 designed by Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vásquez- some of Barragán’s work, Ciudad Univesitaria and contemporary work in Mexico.

The following are recommended Hotels close to the Zocalo, Mexico city’s main plaza
Hotel Gillow $ $47 for two Isabel la Catolica #17 or Hotel Isabel Isabel La Catolica N° 63 at the corner with Rep. Del Salvador Centro Historico. México, D.F. CP 06000 that has rooms for four people for $51 , tel 5518-1213 for ‘Visas: Passport, or proof of citizenship (such as original birth certificate or naturalization certificate) and photo ID is required by American citizens. Tourist card is required. Tourist card valid 3 months for single entry up to 180 days, $20 fee, requires proof of U.S. citizenship, photo ID, and proof of sufficient funds. Visa not required of U.S. citizens for tourist/transit stay of up to 30 days. Obtain tourist cards in advance from Consulate, Tourism Office, and most airlines serving Mexico upon arrival.
If you are not an American citizen check whether you need a visa with the Mexican consulate.( web or phone)

Method
The studio will develop field -work, a diary, recording, research exercises and a film during the Mexico visit + research before and after the trip.

1) Collection:
Research the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City and the Archeological Museum of Xochimilco,( Av. Tenochtitlán and Calle La Planta, Santa Cruz Acalpixca) and books on Xochimilco. Photograph, draw and research twenty pieces that will be the anchors of your museum.

Deliver: a concertino book that you will be able to display with your project the shows and explains the twenty archeological pieces.

2) Material explorations.
Produce a booklet made out of sheets that fit in an 8.5”X11” format
collecting through rubbings and photographs the building/construction textures of Mexico.

3) Diary
Take a notebook on your trip on which you will write a diary of your visit by making notes every day every two hours. Record what you are seeing, exploring, thinking, investigating. Be rigorous, annotate the times of your observations.

4) Compile

Research the subject categories below. Every student is responsible for one;

01. From Teotihuacan to Independence: Mexican history timeline

02. Modern Mexican history (1800-2006)

03. Mexican Avant Garde: art, literature & architecture

04. Urban plans of Mexico City/ History of Cartography

05. Demographics, infrastructure and the environment

06. Barragan, Goeritz and the world

07. Rivera, Kahlo & O’Gorman

08. Zabludovsky, Del Pani, Gonzales de Leon, Cetto

09. Legorreta, Norten y Gomez-Pimienta

10. Kalach & Alvarez, Broid, Rojkind & Ortiz

11. Museo Nacional de Arqueologia, Pedro Ramirez Vasquez,

12. Kevin Roche’s Oakland Museum of California

13. Herzog de Meuron’s DeYoung Museum

14. Latz + Partners, Duisberg-Nord Landscape Park, 1990-2002

15. Smith, Ken The Museum of Modern Art Roof Garden, New York

16. Mosbach Paysagistes, Bourdeaux Botanical Garden, France 2000-02

17. Xochimilco/ Tenochtitlan

Deliver
A 10 slide (or more) Power Point presentation on your category to be shown. We will also watch one of the films.. Photocopy reductions of those slides and accompanying text to be collated and bound into a collective MXDF guidebook. The completed guide (12 copies)

5) Watch
Amores Perros, = Love’s a bitch / Studio Home Entertainment ; Altavista Films presenta una producción de Zeta Film y Altavista Films ; a film by Alejandro González Iñárritu ; directed and produced by Alejandro González Iñárritu ; written by Guillermo Arriaga Jordán Lion’s Gate Home Entertainment ; Marina Del Rey, CA : Distributed by Studio Home Entertainment, c2001
Media Ctr. DVD 1132. Available on line.

The Walls of Mexico, [videorecording] : art and architecture / a film by Guido de Bruyn ; [produced by BRTN Cultural Department].a film by Guido de Bruyn, Princeton, N.J. : Films for the Humanities & Sciences, c1996. U.C. Santa Barbara Arts Lib NA759.B36 W35 1996

Maria Candelaria [videorecording] = Xochimilco / produced by Armando Espinoso ; directed by Emilio Fernandez1943 ; written by Emilio Fernandez and Mauricio Magdaleno. Media Ctr VIDEO/C 999:138

6) Film (small group project)

MXDF Film Primer
The creation of a film is very similar to the making of a complex piece of architecture. The
viewer or participant in both cases is brought into a knowledge of a new world which is built
sequentially over time from the first glimpse and onwards over the duration of the experience.
The author of this strange new world slowly reveals the rules and establishes the sense of the
place. This is the same for the film maker, from using the
“Establishing Shot” to the architects “Promenade Architecturale”; In both, the author will create
tensions, establish conflicts, and frustrate the protagonist, all in an effort to heighten the senses
and stimulate the emotions of the viewer against the context of this world and its “rules”. In both
the perceiver is led through a moving Choreography of “scenes’ or “spaces” towards revealing
the work of art that is the final “feature film” or “building”.

Thematic Structure
In thinking about film editing it is advisable to have a plan – to make rules about the film and
how you want it to look and unfold in time - and then stick to them – whatever they are. A good
place at the start is to consider thematic overarching structure. This can help you to
develop an editorial bias towards the extensive and very rich material and footage that you record

Time: Consider pacing, rhythm, smooth, choppy, chronology, origins, juxtaposition,
inversion, suspension, contraction and expansion, elongation or freeze –
passage and transitions, narrative overlaps and simultaneity, historic time,
memory and biological vs. technology, linear, circular, repetitive, ritualistic, …

Layers: Consider social stratifications, economic, modernism, classical, formal, colors
affinity and contrasts, transparencies, boundaries, borders and frame, cropping,
and close vs. far space, deep and flat space, active and passive, calm vs.
frenetic. Consider Spatial, image depth, thematic, motif, density, time and placelessness,
intricacy, transparencies, superimposition, social structure, authoritative, landscape, ecology , water,power, poverty, information, data, cultural landscapes, civic, historical
and palimpsest structures, streets, light and shadow, color, narrative overlaps
and simultaneity, multiple levels of understanding, degrees of complexity,
collapsed vs. pulled apart. As the film unfolds, and you build your “world”, make these relationships and compositional decisions manifest in all you do. Concentrate on one thing and do it well – work together to be consistent and true to your world as you are describing it - that is the

Schedule: (see attached sheet for details)
SPRING SEMESTER BEGINS Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Academic and Administrative Holiday
Instruction Begins Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Academic and Administrative Holiday Monday, February 19, 2007
Spring Recess Monday, March 26, 2007 -- Friday, March 30, 2007
Cal Day Saturday, April 21, 2007
Instruction Ends Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Final Examinations Friday, May 11, 2007 -- Friday, May 18, 2007
SPRING SEMESTER ENDS Friday, May 18, 2007

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