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<h1 class="reader-title">El vértigo horizontal</h1>
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<div class="credits reader-credits">Juan Villoro</div>
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<p class="subtitle">Villoro’s City of Mexico</p>
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<div class="article-data__item"> <span class="author"> <a
href="https://arquitecturaviva.com/tag/luis-fernandez-galiano">Luis
Fernández-Galiano </a> </span> </div>
<div class="article-data__item"> <span class="date">30/06/2019</span>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">3-4 minutes</div>
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<p><img
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data-db-id="58504" title="Babel horizontal"></p>
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<p>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 <i>cupiditas aedificandi;</i> 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.</p>
<p>Taking as title Drieu La Rochelle’s definition of the
Pampa, <i>El vértigo horizontal </i>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.</p>
<p>Villoro suggests that readers choose the routes that most
interest them, and this makes it obligatory to mention <i>Rayuela,</i>
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 <i>The
Arcades Project.</i> 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 <i>Roma</i>
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 <i>El vértigo horizontal,</i> and
described as the “best critic of progress in 20th-century
Mexican literature.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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