A Bug’s Eye View of Mexico City’s Modernist Architecture

A story by David Dudley for Bloomberg
Photo © David Dudley (cropped to fit) of works of Architect Javier Senosiain

The Mexican architect Javier Senosiain has an aversion to straight lines; his sinuous, surreal buildings take their design cues from flowers, mushrooms, mollusks and snakes. So it feels appropriate to roll up on one of his globular homes in one of the world’s most easily anthropomorphized automobiles, a vintage Volkswagen Bug.

This combination is the inspiration of Nicolas Caillens, who leads a series of architectural tours of Mexico City that exploit the synergy between two local design icons: ultra-modern buildings and old-school VWs.

In the 1950s and ’60s — an era of economic growth known as the “Mexican Miracle” — both could be found in abundance in Mexico’s capital. As wild-looking homes, museums, universities and other infrastructure marched across the booming urban area, so did thousands of the plucky little cars, in Beetle and Microbus form. The Volkswagen factory in the Mexican state of Puebla built the original “Type 1” Beetle sedans until 2003, decades after the last German-made models rolled off the assembly line — and 65 years after the first models emerged in 1938.

The roly-poly cars, known locally as Vochos, once comprised most of Mexico City’s taxi fleet and provided cheap transportation for its burgeoning middle class. Caillens, a French-born design enthusiast who moved to Mexico City from New York more than a decade ago, saw a market opportunity when he decided to build a tour business around the cars. “No one was doing daily architectural tours, and no one was using Mexico’s most iconic vehicle,” he says.

For Caillens, there could be no better choice when it came to showing off the wonders of the city’s built environment. “We were looking for a vehicle that’s linked to the story of Mexico,” he says. “In a modern car, it would have lost some of the experience.”

Caillens now deploys nine VWs, a mix of Bugs and ’buses, in the service of his tour company, the Traveling Beetle. With professional Mexico City architects as guides, daily tours focus on major practitioners of Mexican modernism — names such as Juan O’Gorman, Félix Candela and Luis Barragán — or offer themed overviews of neighborhoods and landmarks.

The local works of Javier Senosiain, who at 76 is still teaching at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), would be a new addition to the team’s repertoire, so he’s arranged a scouting mission to three of the architect’s buildings, accompanied by several of his guides. On an October morning, the group piles into a duo of beautifully restored Volkswagens — an orange 1976 Microbus and a red 1977 Super Beetle convertible — and sets off for the Ciudad Satélite district of Naucalpan, a municipality on the northwest outskirts of Mexico City.

Despite their advanced age and lack of creature comforts, the pair of puttering mid-century machines negotiate the modern megacity with aplomb, keeping up with freeway traffic and parrying with SUVs and mopeds on downtown streets. A top-down Vocho also turns out to be an excellent architectural viewing platform; as we blast up the periférico, the back seat gets a glorious 180-degree view of Barragán’s Torres de Satélite, a stark collection of five angular towers built in 1958.

In the front seat, Pamela Caparraso Guttierez, a local architect also on Caillens’ team of guides, points out the striking concrete sculptures, which serve as a gateway for the master-planned Satélite district. Envisaged as a bedroom community with a greenbelt of parks for wealthy commuters escaping the crush of the central city, Satélite boasts a curious street layout, with oval circuits that eliminate the need for traffic lights and large, blocky homes secreted behind walls.

Our first stop sits in the middle of one such block but bears no resemblance to its neighbors. Hidden behind an undulating concrete facade that separates it from the street, Senosiain’s Conjunto Satélite is a quartet of dome-shaped homes completed in 1995 that appear to have been ported over from some funky Teletubbies universe — gently contoured, grass-covered hillocks crowned with bubble skylights and flora-derived shapes.

Read the full story here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-11-16/a-bug-s-eye-view-of-mexico-city-s-modernist-architecture?srnd=undefined