Thirty Years of Landscape Architecture in Mexico

 
How did your interest in landscape architecture come about?

As a student in the mid-1960s I began to get interested in exterior spaces and the relationship between buildings and landscape. My principal influence was Luis Barragán, a rather unpopular figure in those years of post-functionalism.... In magazines I discovered the work of Lawrence Halprin in California, his projects with Charles Moore and the Berkeley group. Also Roberto Burle Marx, whose work captivated me... Around that time some of the people who had gone abroad to study urban planning began to return: Domingo García Ramos and Villagrán, as well as Guillermo Shelley, who had studied with Kenzo Tange and Josep Lluís Sert at Harvard.... Then there were the landscape architecture courses offered by Carlos Contreras and Carlos Bernal Salina, who had been studying at Berkeley.

Would you agree that, whereas the American schools tend to focus on parks, landscape architecture in Mexico has been linked more closely with urban planning?

I was part of that trend in the discipline, because there used be no genuine landscape architecture, but simply urbanism. Doors were opening for people who had just returned who showed us a different kind of urban design. My generation was very interested in all that, people like Félix Sánchez and Francisco Covarrubias. I was interested in combining urban design and landscape architecture. I discovered this in Berkeley, where I became friends with Garrett Eckbo, whose book Landscape for Living made a big impression on me. His radical vision of landscape and of housing influenced me deeply, both the large housing developments and the recycling of barracks in the San Francisco Bay area.
Eckbo was slightly marginalized, because in those years he was more interested in the social movement than in landscape or urbanism. Many firms in the American West came into being thanks to the work of Eckbo, James Rose, and Dan Kiley, transformers of the landscape and the forerunners of an authentic pedigree of American landscape architecture.

Apart from Barragán, was there anyone in Mexico at that time concerned with landscape?

Not really, although there was Carlos Bernal and Eliseo Arredondo, the founder of the Society of Landscape Architects, who was beginning to undertake road landscape projects, such as the landscaping of the highway to Querétaro.

In the Mexican context, what is the difference between landscaping (jardinería) and landscape architecture?

It is primarily the scale that distinguishes landscape architecture from simple landscaping. Arredondo was Director of Parks and Gardens in Mexico City. Under his administration some good foundations were laid -though unfortunately they have since been lost-, such as the traffic circles, the first renovation of the Alameda, the restoration of Desierto de los Leones. He even had a hand in the Second Section of Chapultepec Park....

In the 1970s conceptual art and minimalism make their appearance in the United States. Artists abandon the galleries and intervene in the landscape: Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Walter de María... At the same time, the ecology movement gains momentum and a real environmental awareness begins to spread. Was anything similar happening in Mexico?

I don't think so. The ecological and environmental vision arose out of the famous "Earth Day" in Berkeley in 1968. There also emerged a new art associated with landscape, with two outstanding figures: Burle Marx and Isamo Noguchi. The landscape artists and architects absorb this only in the 1970s: Heizer, Long, De María.... It is the great transformation of the art. Modernism has exhausted itself and there is this move to the exterior in art and architecture.
The issues in the United States at that time were social and urban. It was thought that design should not be aesthetic but social, environmental, and above all participative. People's Park in Berkeley played an emblematic role. It was occupied by the hippies, who began to decide how to manage it. The landscape school at Berkeley also got involved, trying to understand how to get people to participate.
There are two other important figures in this current: Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard, my thesis adviser. I collaborated in his research into establishing environmental criteria in questions of urban growth. Appleyard began to create mock-ups and to film them as simulated growth forecasts, long before computers. This laboratory work influenced me greatly.

When you returned to Mexico in the mid-1970s, with other architects of your generation, such as Félix Sánchez, you became involved in public landscape. How did your practice evolve?

When I came back I decided not to do private architecture, but rather public architecture, landscape, and urbanism. For five years I worked at INFONAVIT, the Worker's Housing Fund (I am one of its founders), an extraordinary experience. In the mid-1970s I designed a private housing project: Quinta Eugenia. This allowed me to speculate: we made three or four designs before opting for two parallel buildings, always insisting on the large open space that would cover the parking area.

You also played an important role in some publishing ventures...

I had always been interested in the history and theory of architecture. When Mario Pani revived his magazine Arquitectura, he invited Félix Sánchez Louise Noelle, and myself, among others, to contribute. In the 1960s I published México urbano and in the 1980s Principios de diseño urbano ambiental. But the most important publishing project was the magazine Entorno, edited by Félix Sánchez and Lorenzo Aldana, which brought together issues of urban design, architecture, and the environment.

How do you view the landscape architecture of the new generation?

It is paradoxical, because there is tremendous interest in landscape architecture in Mexico, but this is not complemented by action. There is a basic lack of programs in the educational institutions. In the 1960s, the UNAM began to support Master's programs: I myself am an example of how an institution can foster someone's development. Forty years later, there are Master's programs but no professors to teach them, and planning is still subject to the demands of mega-projects. There is no vision of urban design capable of promoting participation, public transport, the dynamics of growth...
Nevertheless, there are some interesting figures, whose approach reflects the places where they studied. Desirée Martínez studied in Germany and has a solid understanding of landscape architecture from an environmental perspective. Alejandro Cabeza, who was trained in Edinburgh in the English landscaping tradition, has a strong sense of surroundings. There are others, but I see more landscapers than landscape architects, something for which I have the greatest respect. The teachers, however, do not promote an urban design linked to landscape and surroundings. Many have gone on to do Master's degrees, others have worked with Peter Walker or Martha Schwartz. There are seeds, but in a country as large as Mexico, with so many problems and opportunities, it is hard to believe there is not a more flourishing movement.
One positive thing is that in recent years several fine architects have become involved in large-scale developments. The developers have realized that a good landscape design gives added value to a project and that it can go hand in hand with infrastructure.

  
Mario Schjetnan is the author of some of the most important landscape architecture projects in Mexico, both private and public, on greatly differing scales. A graduate of the UNAM, with a Master's degree in landscape architecture from Berkeley, a Loeb Fellow of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, and professor at the universities of Harvard, Berkeley, and Virginia, he has been involved in the decisive debates and transformations in the field of landscape architecture over the past thirty years.
Schjetnan has managed to integrate the global discourse on landscape into his local professional practice, developing a unique vision of his discipline which combines history, hydrology, infrastructure, aesthetics, and the environment.     Jose Castillo