[D66] [JD: 136] El Vértigo Horizontal

[R.O.]

arquitecturaviva.com
<https://arquitecturaviva.com/books/el-vertigo-horizontal-5>


  El vértigo horizontal

Juan Villoro

Villoro’s City of Mexico

Luis Fernández-Galiano 
<https://arquitecturaviva.com/tag/luis-fernandez-galiano>
30/06/2019

3-4 minutes
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[Babel horizontal]

If a horizontal Babel exists, it has to be the City of Mexico. The
biblical Tower of Babel was for a long time the emblem of the /cupiditas
aedificandi;/ and architects chose representations of its construction
as symbols of their determination to surpass technical and theological
limits. For some time now, the building urge has been better expressed
by the indefinite spread-out of cities, in a sprawl over the territory
that one might call a horizontal Babel, illustrated for decades through
the night view of an endless Los Angeles, and now eloquently by Mexico
City, to which the writer Juan Villoro has devoted a thrilling and
indispensable volume.

Taking as title Drieu La Rochelle’s definition of the Pampa, /El vértigo
horizontal /compiles 44 texts that combine the chronicle or the essay
with the autobiography of one who in the course of sixty years has lived
in some twelve different addresses, and who composes this pixelated
portrait of his city superposing it on his own life’s journey in the
manner of a palimpsest. This labyrinth of memory is playfully ordered in
six itineraries that groups texts thematically, and each one is
associated with the logo of a station in a diagram that echoes the map
of Mexico City’s subway, about which the author wrote the first of these
essays twenty-five years ago.

Villoro suggests that readers choose the routes that most interest them,
and this makes it obligatory to mention /Rayuela,/ which also suggested
different reading paths; and the accumulation of motley materials makes
the writer of the foreword believe that the work is indebted to /The
Arcades Project./ Julio Cortázar and Walter Benjamin in fact appear in
the narrative, but the book’s kaleidoscopic approach has little to do
with experimental fireworks or with a bibliothecarian collage: its
meticulous intertwining of nostalgia with social or political chronicle
is more evocative of the /Roma/ of Alfonso Cuarón or the Battles in the
Desert of José Emilio Pacheco, a ‘child of Colonia Roma’ who is
mentioned in several chapters of /El vértigo horizontal,/ and described
as the “best critic of progress in 20th-century Mexican literature.”

The vertigo that the unstoppable growth of the city produces in Villoro
does not however make him hostile to progress, however much he pursues
small redoubts within the xxl-scaled urb he looks upon with the gaze of
Rem Koolhaas, but knowing that his own is closer to that of Don DeLillo,
Peter Handke, or W.G. Sebald; and all the while exploring the ‘vertical
voracity’ of the Mexican capital through the high-rises of Mario Pani,
Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, Teodoro González de León, or César Pelli.

The young Villoro in uniform lies to a young woman he is courting,
assuring her that he intends to study architecture, and the great writer
he has become tricks his readers by pretending to be puzzled by a city
he understands better than any urban planner. We routinely talk about
Döblin’s Berlin or Joyce’s Dublin in the same way that, more recently,
we refer to Padura’s Havana or Mendoza’s Barcelona. After this
extraordinary mosaic, I cannot help thinking of ‘Villoro’s City of
Mexico’ as the best representation of that fascinating horizontal Babel.

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