Responsive Eyes: Urban Logistics and Kinetic
Environments for the 1968 Mexico City
Olympics
U
nlike the two previous Summer Olympics, in Rome
(1960) and Tokyo (1964), there was no single zone
where competitions and related activities were cen­
tered for the 1968 Mexico City Games. Mexico 68, as the
games were branded by designer Lance Wyman and archi­
tect Eduardo Terrazas in their now iconic op art–inspired
logo, took place at more than twenty venues throughout
the city (Figure 1). From October 12 to October 27, tens of
thousands of athletes, officials, journalists, and spectators
traveled between the venues, in addition to the millions of
resident commuters who traversed the city most days. Such
a complex arrangement, due in part to the use of preexisting
as well as new facilities, required efficient means of com­
munication. Terrazas, head of urban design for the Mexican
Organizing Committee (MOC), oversaw the creation of a
network of color-coded routes carved from Mexico City’s
major streets and highways, many recently expanded as part
of a municipal reorganization of infrastructure. Terrazas’s
team also designed an aesthetically cohesive array of street
furniture and decorations (information kiosks, trash bins,
banners), displacing the roads’ usual inhabitants and cacoph­
ony, both aural and visual (Figure 2).1 Art critic and sculptor
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73, no. 3 (September 2014), 372–397. ISSN
0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2014 by the Society of Architectural Histo­rians.
All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce
­article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions web-
site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2014.73.3.372.  parations were extended to the last minute. That Mexico,
george f. flaherty
University of Texas, Austin
Mathias Goeritz invited artists from participating nations to
submit designs for a series of monumental abstract sculptures
for the Ruta de Amistad, or Route of Friendship (Figure 3).
Executed in concrete and placed along the southern ring
road (Periférico Sur) that connected the largest stadia and
athletes’ residences, they were best viewed through the wind­
shield of a passing car. Homes and businesses adjacent to the
official routes were given cans of paint and flowerpots to tidy
up the edges of neighborhoods not reached by the MOC’s
beautification efforts. Such places did not match the pro­
moted image—or rather the complex of images, spaces, and
sounds—of a thoroughly modernized Mexico circulated by
the committee before the games.2
Although championed by former president Adolfo
López Mateos (1958–64), an avid sportsman and modernizer,
Mexico City was not expected to succeed in its bid to host the
1968 Olympics. Detroit, seeming to be the metropolis of the
future in 1963, was the favorite. But the games were increas­
ingly becoming an opportunity for a country to announce its
arrival (or return) to the world stage, in which a spectacular
performance signaled participation in the global economic
order. Mexico had experienced nearly three decades of
­favorable macroeconomic indicators, the so-called Mexican
­Miracle, and Mexico City was chosen to host the games.3
Two years had passed before the MOC began its operations
in earnest, however, so the construction of venues and pre­
the first Latin American host, was deemed by the Interna­
tional Olympic Committee to be sufficiently industrialized
did not deter global powers from expressing, often in neoco­
lonial terms, their discomfort with an apparent shift in the
postwar world order. The Euro-American press was quick to
air doubts as to whether the MOC could deliver the technically
and logistically complex mega event on time.4
Reflecting on the Mexico 68 “identity program,” as the
MOC deemed its overall project, committee chairman Pedro
Ramírez Vázquez remarked, “[sports] records fade away,
Figure 1  Olympic logo, Lance Wyman with Eduardo Terrazas, designers,
1968 (courtesy of Eduardo Terrazas).
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but the image of a country does not.”5 Course setting and
image management were communication concerns for the
MOC, but so too was conveying the Olympic proceedings to
audiences throughout Mexico and abroad. Mexico 68 was
broadcast largely live and in color around the world, thanks
to recent advances in satellite technology, garnering an
unprecedented audience of nearly 600 million. The MOC
not only aimed to move participants and visitors around dis­
persed venues, or to circulate evidence of material improve­
ments in the capital indicating preparedness for the games,
or even to produce mobile architecture such as information
towers and kiosks, but also sought to persuade audiences to
view Mexico City as a thoroughly modernized, equal partner
in a network of worldwide hubs for design, art, and technol­
ogy with New York and Milan. The MOC did so by demon­
strating both familiarity and fluency in aesthetics and
discourses with global trends: optical and kinetic art and also
cybernetics, ecology, and Gestalt psychology. Ramírez
Vázquez recalled President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz giving him
his charge: “The first challenge is to rescue confidence in our
ability to do it, and it must be demonstrated immediately.”
The architect added: “We had to produce an image that
immediately provoked surprise, an effective image.”6
Terrazas, in collaboration with Wyman, Beatrice True­
blood (head of publications), and others, created street
­furniture, office interiors, and displays for international events
in Mexico City and Milan. These temporary—and in some
cases modular and portable—kinetic environments employed
a coordinated aesthetic schema that integrated architecture,
visual communication, and designed objects. I am using the
phrase “kinetic environments” to refer to spaces that marshal
Figure 2  Mexico 68 streetscape with
plastic “Dove of Peace” banners, Eduardo
Terrazas, supervisor, 1968 (courtesy of
Eduardo Terrazas).

Figure 3  Solar Disk by Belgian sculptor Jacques Moeschal for
the Ruta de la Amistad (Route of Friendship), Mathias Goertiz,
coordinator, 1968 (from a special issue of Artes de México
sponsored by the Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX
Olimpiada, 1968).
movement, whether from the material components or users,
and also the intention to act upon or “move” audiences psycho­
logically or physiologically. Audiences ranging from interna­
tional tastemakers and domestic decision makers to casual
passersby were invited to immerse themselves and interact
with the identity program in experiences not unlike happen­
ings and other neo-avant-garde experiments of the period.
The effectiveness of the MOC environments often turned
on interrupting passive or distracted audience reception and
altering guests’ visual and spatial perceptions. Mexico 68
demanded a “responsive eye,” to borrow the title of a major
exhibition of op art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art
seen by Wyman and Terrazas in 1965; by this point, op art
was a worldwide phenomenon absorbed by advertising,
­fashion, and industrial design.7 Coordinating this integration
and mobilization of design—with its various professionals,
disciplinary perspectives, technologies, and publics—required
project and traffic management skills, or what an American
art critic following the Mexico 68 preparations identified as
“urban logistics.”8
While the politics of Mexico’s unexpected selection as
host and the attendant press coverage are well known to
scholars, as are analyses of the MOC’s tremendous graphic
output, which remain a touchstone for global design history,
374    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
less is known regarding the kinetic environments created
by the committee that strategically employed “surprising”
elements.9 These environments were spaces of self-conscious
experimentation for architects and allied designers renego­
tiating their professional status in the postwar period.
By contextualizing the Mexico 68 design efforts beyond the
finite span of the Olympic Games (and Mexico) not only do
dense networks of exchange among Mexican architects and
their collaborators come into view but we recognize the
social stakes of such contact, including the renewal of mod­
ernist utopias and also politique professional maneuvers, both
local and global.
The Context of Design
Responding to foreign doubts about Mexico’s preparedness,
the MOC circulated a nearly constant flow of publicity prior
to the apertura (“opening ceremony,” but also meaning aper­
ture, like that of a camera) depicting an urbanized, techno­
logically up-to-date society and detailing the construction
of venues as well as upcoming cultural events to accompany
the athletic competitions. No longer able to question Mexico
City’s modernity, the press turned its attention to its high
altitude, a natural “deficiency” that could not be overcome,
no matter how thoroughly it modernized or how quickly it
built stadia. Sitting in a volcanic basin, Mexico City is almost
2,500 meters above sea level. The city’s location also makes
it difficult for pollution to escape. It was believed that this
combination would adversely affect athletes’ performance
and health in the long term. Although medical evidence
showed that there was little risk, the more pessimistic predic­
tions made headlines.10 But journalists arriving in early
August and late September encountered breathing difficul­
ties of an entirely different sort: thick clouds of tear gas
used by riot police to disperse striking students and faculty
seeking refuge inside Mexico City schools and universities.
This was part of the single-party state’s violent reaction to a
democratization movement that had emerged in July in
response to police brutality. Views of gleaming hotel towers
competed with images of protesters, military deployments,
and student parodies of MOC graphics for the attention of
guests.11 On 2 October, ten days before the opening cere­
mony, President Díaz Ordaz’s administration ordered state
security forces to attack a peaceful student demonstration at
Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, a massive public housing and national
heritage project that was supposed to be shown off to tourists,
at the intersection of two Olympic routes, leaving an esti­
mated 300 dead.12
The design of Mexico 68 was attempting to offer a holis­
tic image of Mexico at exactly the moment when social and
 political fractures were most visible. The MOC’s integrated
approach responded to a variety of international and domestic
charges, both explicitly and implicitly. It delivered the mate­
rial requirements of the Olympics—competition venues,
athletes’ residences, and infrastructure—on time and in
favorable comparison to previous hosts. The MOC also pro­
jected an image of Mexico as thoroughly modernized,
a socially integrated and liberally democratic society in spite
of its uneven modernization. An ever-widening spectrum of
citizens questioned the lack of political liberalization to
accompany economic expansion and the state’s use of authori­
tarian measures to guarantee foreign investor-friendly stabil­
ity. The students were only the latest in a series of protests
against state policies; the “Miracle” was still a leap of faith
for many citizens.13 When López Mateos, who served as the
original committee chairman, fell ill in 1966, he was replaced
by Ramírez Vázquez. The architect was selected for his exten­
sive experience in managing complex public education and
cultural projects, including the recently inaugurated Museo
Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthro­
pology, 1964, with Jorge Campuzano and Rafael Mijares),
and also for his close association with the government.14
The MOC’s interventions should also be situated within
Mexico’s architectural establishment and Mexico City’s
­capitalist urbanization. In an ongoing process, modernist
architects in Mexico sought to play a major supervisory role
as the city grew rapidly in population, footprint, and economic
output.15 In the architecture journal Calli, Terrazas told his
colleagues: “the life of the city should not be detained for
the realization of an occasional activity, but rather this activity
should sow conditions that permit the improvement of living
conditions in the city. The signage and street furniture
that we have designed are media that serve as a base for a total
urban organization.”16 In the 1920s and 1930s, modernist
architects expanded their professional purchase, claiming
expertise by adopting urban planning’s overarching and
pattern-identifying modes of social vision. The emergence
and consolidation of modern architecture in Mexico, as else­
where, were tied to architects’ claims of seeing the city as a
whole and representing it as a complex system of inputs and
outputs (flows of people, goods, electricity, waste, and so
forth). At midcentury, architectural expertise was ­further
refined in light of recent technological advances, related
theories of communication, and computational and vanguard
experiments in visualizing urban form and experience syn­
thetically. For example, cybernetics, which explored feed­
back loops and continual self-regulation (tending toward
homeostasis), inspired new ways of dynamically visualizing
urban form and experience, what Mark Wigley referred
to as the period’s “network fever.”17 These developments,
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originating in the sciences but also in the arts in Mexico and
abroad, expressly called for closer collaboration and exchange
among professions and disciplines. As in Europe, such devel­
opments renewed debates from earlier in the century over
the integration of modern art and architecture. Goeritz was
in the forefront of artists advocating for greater collaboration
between the two fields. Like the planner-architect, he envi­
sioned the environment as a capacious milieu for interven­
tion that could invite increased participation on the part of
its user-beholders.
This is not to say that MOC’s kinetic environments
and staged social encounters remained unaltered by their
audiences, despite being treated more or less as controlled
experiments. To highlight this dynamic, this article compares
the committee’s interventions to concurrent art exhibitions
and happenings, both affiliated with Mexico 68 and indepen­
dent. An MOC-sponsored exhibition of kinetic art hosted by
Goeritz in 1968 drew from new technologies but offered
(especially as framed by the sculptor-critic’s catalogue essay
and previous writings) an open-ended experience that did
not presume to move a viewer’s perceptions in any predeter­
mined direction toward an artistic or political status quo.
As this exhibit and kinetic environments by others made
clear, consumption was not a passive, unilateral experience;
the vagaries of audience reception could frustrate (if not
hijack or shut down) carefully laid plans and seemingly self-
sufficient environments. The responsive eyes invited by the
task force of Mexico 68 and its related events were responsive
indeed.
Mexico 68 signified the evolving exchange between
architects and artists and the state and business interests.
Although neither the first Olympics to be broadcast via satel­
lite in color (Tokyo) nor the first to emerge from centrally
coordinated urban redevelopment (Rome), Mexico 68
offered an early case study in the complex nexus of design,
art, and technology required by the modern Olympic
­movement.18 It also signaled the shifting professional stakes
for architects who participated in this transition. Through a
close reading of kinetic environments and the aesthetics and
discourses linked to them, a shift in Mexico’s midcentury
architectural culture may be mapped. Modernist architects
had already collaborated with each other and with colleagues
in related fields in the construction of large-scale projects
such as the Ciudad Universitaria (1952, Mario Pani and
Enrique del Moral, supervising architects). The new university
campus incorporated local materials and “Mexican” decora­
tion with modernist form (Figure 4). The University City
was promoted as a showplace manifesting the facile coopera­
tion between the state, architects, and artists to produce a
modernity that was recognized abroad but that retained its

national distinction, strengthening its exportability.19 The
8th Pan-American Congress of Architects, which attracted
close to 2,000 professionals from across the Americas, was
held on the campus in 1952 to preview the collaborative
accomplishment. In a guide to contemporary Mexican archi­
tecture published for congress participants, architecture
critic Richard Grove wrote, “Especially worthy of note are
the many cases in which painters and sculptors have collabo­
rated with the architects. This creative partnership is one
of  the aspects most suggestive to foreign observers.”20
In addition to requiring much larger interdisciplinary teams
and offering a much larger audience, Mexico 68 was an
opportunity for Terrazas and colleagues to cement their role
as expert mediators—between Mexico City and state, archi­
tecture and art, Mexico and the wider world—or the mod­
ernist architect as apertura in a networked world.
This enhanced professionalization of modern archi­
tecture in Mexico not only coincided with but intersected a
broader international reevaluation of various kinds of mod­
ernism after World War II. Networks of architects, artists,
and intellectuals, critical of the objectives and methods of
groups such as the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture
376    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
Figure 4  View of Ciudad Universitaria
from Avenida de los Insurgentes, Mexico
City, inaugurated 1952 (from México 68,
no. 2 [Mexico City: Comité Organizador
de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada, 1969]).
Moderne (CIAM) or the militarization of scientific investiga­
tion during wartime, embraced an interdisciplinary collab­
orative approach that was technologically advanced as the
solution to perceived social ills. At the same time, they
aspired to renew certain established modernist techniques
and even utopias, including the concept of estrangement
(“surprise” per Ramírez Vázquez) as tools for the transfor­
mation of social structures. Terrazas is a key figure in linking
Mexico to this reevaluation of modernisms.21 After studying
architecture in Mexico, Terrazas assembled an array of inter­
national apprenticeships, including with Team X collective
architect Shadrach Woods in Paris and industrial designer
George Nelson in New York. Terrazas and Nelson also cor­
responded with György Kepes at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, all subscribing to this ethos of renewal albeit
from differing vantage points.22 By looking closely at this
enmeshing of networks, several less-than-utopian or demo­
cratic aspects of this “second modernism,” as some architec­
ture historians have recently called it, come into view.23 With
the MOC’s kinetic environments and network thinking
­executed under the auspices of the state in an authoritarian
sociopolitical context, the notions of hierarchies, controls,
and the cult of technical expertise inherent in ostensibly neu­
tral fields such as cybernetics or cognitive psychology com­
plicate the appearance of optimism (and presumed nobility)
of this newish wave.
Integrated Design
A day after witnessing the parade of athletes at the apertura,
the New York Times reported, “The biggest Olympic ‘team’
here is representing neither the Soviet Union (401 athletes),
the United States (393) nor Mexico (327). It’s the 464-­member
squad of the American Broadcasting Company.”24 Camera
crews roved the competitions, and several of the purpose-
built venues were designed to prioritize technical as well as
photogenic requirements of mass media. The MOC’s Palacio
de Deportes, the result of collaboration between archi­
tects Félix Candela, Antonio Peyri, and Enrique Castañeda
Tamborrel, was arguably the most formally striking and
often photographed. Candela and his colleagues devised a
superstructure of intersecting steel rods anchored to piers.
Its dome and pier system recalled Annibale Vitellozzi and
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Pier Luigi Nervi’s Palazzetto dello Sport for the Rome
Olympics. In Mexico City, copper-plated wood panels hung
from rods to reflect the sun. The MOC carefully tracked its
construction, especially its dome, publishing countless pho­
tographs of its dazzling effect (Figure 5).
By the early 1960s, photographic reproduction was
such an important factor for the Olympics that architect
Mauricio Gómez Mayorga complained of the camera’s ten­
dency to dramatize and ultimately to trivialize architecture’s
functionality, with buildings judged only for their looks.
The polemical architect complained in a leading art journal:
“Our present buildings are very ‘photogenic,’ a quality which
often distracts us from their real significance. … Buildings
are not façades and even less photographs of façades; they are
logical and organized orchestrations of habitable interiors
through the course of time.”25 The systems of the Palacio,
which were not immediately visible, were perhaps more
important to the MOC’s identity program, extending Gómez
Mayorga’s notion of functionality. The lack of interior sup­
ports provided unimpeded camera sight lines, and the acous­
tics were calibrated to improve audio recording.26 The Sports
Figure 5  Palacio de Deportes, Mexico
City, Antonio Peyri, Enrique Castañeda
Tamborrel, and Félix Candela, architects,
1968 (from México 68, no. 1 [Mexico City:
Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la
XIX Olimpiada, 1969]; photograph by
Francisco Uribe).
 Palace was as much a broadcast station as a basketball arena.
On a preview tour of venues, President Díaz Ordaz boasted
to the press that Mexico was building on “the scientific and
technological advances that are constantly being produced
in the world.”27 By formally quoting the Palazzetto yet inte­
grating eight years’ worth of developments in structural
engineering and broadcast communication technologies
since the Roman structure was built, the Palacio implied
that techno-­economic exchange between Mexico and the
world was by no means unreciprocated. Even Wyman’s op
­art–inspired logo, with its concentric black lines, which
served as the graphic basis for MOC’s identity program,
appeared to radiate such cosmopolitan ambitions. Indeed,
the designer applied the radiating motif to a commemorative
stamp featuring a drawing of Candela’s Sports Palace, which
circulated in the post and made visible its normally imper­
ceptible capabilities.28
In the two years leading up to Mexico 68, the MOC
produced not only photogenic architecture such as the
­Palacio de Deportes but also experimented with the potential
to connect directly with audiences in Mexico City and sites
where international art and architectural tastemakers gathered.
Among the earliest of these environments in the Mexican
capital was the Olympic Center, an administrative and hos­
pitality building with a lobby open to the public.29 The
­slender twelve-story curtain-walled tower on Paseo de la
Reforma was situated close to Chapultepec Park and the
Museo de Arte Moderno and the Museo Nacional de Antro­
pología, both designed by Ramírez Vázquez (and others),
and completed in 1964 (Figure 6). The tree- and monument-
lined boulevard that linked the city’s historic core to
378    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
upper-class residential neighborhoods was lined with
chic shops, cafés, and corporate offices, including several
other blue-green glass high-rises that also linked Mexico
City to New York and Chicago. While the façade may have
appeared contemporary but increasingly commonplace by
the 1960s, the center’s lobby was intended to astound visitors
by blurring boundaries between architecture, signage, and
city.
Resembling art galleries or design showrooms nearby,
the Olympic Center lobby shared artists’ and retailers’ emer­
gent interest in creating environments oriented toward not
only offering objects for contemplation or sale but also stag­
ing experiences with perceptual, affective, or communicative
aspects.30 These spaces recognized that the spectator was a
mobile human participating in the utilization of these spaces
through their responses. Visitors entered though a small
patio off the boulevard into an ample public lobby that
included a reception desk and exhibition space, a small res­
taurant, and a boutique selling MOC-licensed merchandise.31
The various zones were linked by a burnt-orange-and-
magenta color scheme used throughout with a minimum of
conventional partition walls. Transparent acrylic panels were
used to permit sunlight to penetrate the space and allow
­visitors to inhabit particular zones while apprehending the
lobby as a whole and perceiving the correspondences
between its parts (Figure 7). A visitor’s field of vision was
obstructed only by posters, brochures, and newsletters
affixed to the clear panels, sharing in the task of forming the
interior. At the same time, the transparent panels appeared
to dematerialize that very form. Clear plastic beach-ball-like
globes embossed with the op art logo clustered on the floor
Figure 6  Museo de Arte Moderno,
Mexico City, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and
Rafael Mijares, architects, 1964 (from
México 68, no. 1 [Mexico City: Comité
Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX
Olimpiada, 1969]; photograph by Michael
Putnam).

made a similar case for the plasticity of visual communication
and the graphic quality of designed modular objects.
There were several artists and designers working in this
vein at the same time. The Olympic Center’s open-yet-­
unified lobby recalled other projects supervised by Ramírez
Vázquez for the Mexican government. At the Seattle World’s
Fair (1962), where the organizers standardized the space
allotted to exhibitors, designer Iker Larrauri used large panels
with superimposed photographs of Mexican monuments
to produce a distinctive architectural entrance.32 The lobby
also paralleled contemporary corporate workspace design,
such as Herman Miller’s “Action Office” (Robert Propst with
George Nelson).33 The Mexico 68 beach balls recalled the
inflatable furniture of Quasar Khanh in France and Paolo
Lomazzi in Italy. While Terrazas and Trueblood did not
explicitly acknowledge these affinities, they were clearly
demonstrating their familiarity with global aesthetic currents,
vanguard and commercial (another blurred boundary), a key
reason Ramírez Vázquez had hired them. Terrazas, despite
having the most peripatetic training of the creative team,
asserted the architect’s privilege of mediation—a cornerstone
of modernist architecture in Mexico. Folk artists, he noted,
traditionally decorated balloons for festivals, and Mexico was
the world’s leading balloon manufacturer.34 That latter men­
tion suggests that while the MOC may not have pioneered
all aspects of its identity program, the country’s rich petro­
leum reserves made it a leading producer of the hydrocarbon
plastics used in contemporary design, underwriting its par­
ticipation in the field.35
As much as the lobby’s design encouraged visitors to
linger, taking time to inspect the publications and other
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Figure 7  Olympic Center lobby display
(courtesy of Eduardo Terrazas).
products, it also invited them to look through the floor-to-
ceiling windows onto the street (Figure 8). Like the globes,
several of the windows were embossed with the Mexico 68
logo, linking the showroom to the city. The logo’s radiating
concentric lines suggested that anything that appeared in this
“aperture” was trademarked by the MOC. While delimited
in dimension (and cost), various design disciplines were inte­
grated to create a seamless transition from the controlled
environment of the lobby to Mexico City, the wider world
and back again.
This integrative yet expansive approach was not limited
to interiors. Peter Murdoch was contracted to create porta­
ble environments to inform audiences about the Olympics
and reinforce the MOC’s approach to design as communica­
tion (and vice versa). The British industrial designer had
come to international prominence with a chair design that
used a single piece of die-cut and folded card stock.36 The
idea of shipping modular parts of a display or even a building
was not new, but for Mexico 68, Murdoch employed the
recently introduced flat-pack design to create modular exhi­
bition and information displays. The folding and stackable
cubic aluminum frames, quickly and inexpensively shipped
to Mexican embassies and international events, supported
panels printed with Mexico 68 pictograms to inform the pub­
lic of the sport competitions and cultural events (Figure 9).
Three to five cubes could be stacked to create towers, guar­
anteeing their visibility on busy streets or exhibition halls.
The towers were often arranged in clusters that resembled
a cityscape, a gesture to adjacent architecture. Tabletop
­editions were constructed of cardboard. Murdoch and his
colleagues readily adjusted the scale and material of their

projects, understanding design as a spectrum of platforms
rather than a series of discrete disciplines. This flexibility
facilitated the mobility and networked status of design itself.
Flat-pack principles were also applied to larger informa­
tion kiosks that housed multilingual attendants and were set
up throughout Mexico City to help visitors and residents
with directions. The relatively small scale and ready-to-dis/
assemble construction of the kiosks allowed them to be
­easily delivered by truck, efficiently responding to organiz­
ers’ needs (Figure 10). The exteriors of both towers and
kiosks were saturated with instantly identifiable Mexico 68
pictograms that could be used to supplement the attendant’s
­verbal guidance. As at the Tokyo Olympics four years earlier,
380    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
Figure 8  Olympic Center lobby entrance
with Mexico 68 logo windows (courtesy
of Eduardo Terrazas).
Figure 9  Mexico 68 information towers
in situ, Peter Murdoch, designer, 1968
(from México 68, no. 2 [Mexico City:
Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la
XIX Olimpiada, 1969]).
where designers worked to overcome the country’s perceived
“foreignness,” the MOC aspired to universal communication
by blurring the boundaries of built environment and visual
communication. The committee reported that “hundreds of
words in dozens of languages were superseded by graphic
symbols representing services and facilities for participants
and visitors.”37
The MOC’s impulse toward integration was amplified
by the scale and scope of its production and distribution—
and its own representation of that network. It meticulously
inventoried its technological wherewithal in the pages of
its numerous publications.38 Maps showing overlapping
and  interlocking networks (routes, microwave relays,
Figure 10  Various Mexico 68 information kiosk elevations, Peter Murdoch, designer, 1968 (from México 68, no. 2 [Mexico City: Comité
Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada, 1969]).

flight paths) were another motif, suggesting the omnipresent
and potent reach of the committee and the Mexican govern­
ment, even if such depicted infrastructure was still under
construction or only planned for future work (Figure 11).
This did not preclude the MOC from bombastically claim­
ing in its final report to the International Olympic Commit­
tee that “time and space have been conquered. Events and
their transmission by means of symbols, images, and words
have become nearly simultaneous.”39 However, as Ariel
Rodríguez Kuri, an early analyst of the politics of Mexico 68,
described: “The physical evidence of those [Olympic] build­
ings, of those trains, of those monuments, cannot cause us to
forget that their existence is not the product of a rich and
omnipotent State, but the miracle of a poor and anemic state
that frequently did not even know how to collect taxes.”40
The MOC’s interventions confirmed a robust conversation
among Mexican architects, designers, and artists (whether
explicitly cited or not) and sought to fill in, often hyperboli­
cally, the unevenness of Mexico’s modernization project.
However, the committee’s claims of sublime technological
omnipotence, seamless urban tableaux, and unfettered com­
munication should not be taken at face value. Their interven­
tions responded to the requirements of hosting the mega
media event but also involved Mexico’s capitalist urbanization,
which was still very much in process. The ensuing negotia­
tions by a variety of interested parties included architects as

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well as the audiences invited to (re)produce these spaces
through movement, perception, and participation.
For Mexico 68, the MOC built some venues specifically
for the games and took advantage of some existing facilities,
requiring participants and spectators to navigate the city.
Mexico City had grown tremendously since the 1940s, both
in population and physical boundaries but without much
planning: major infrastructure was still under construction.
The result was a city highly fragmented physically but also
culturally and administratively “extended until [traveling]
between its parts became difficult and the overall image
evaporated,” as Néstor García Canclini described, a “city of
travelers.”41 To travel from the new Palacio de Deportes
(1968) to the Estadio Olímpico (1952), a showplace of mod­
ernist architecture on the new national university campus,
one would need to go nearly 10 miles. Athletes were housed
in apartments built on reclaimed lava fields near the Olympic
Stadium at the city’s southern edge, while the press was
housed at the Hotel María Isabel on Paseo de la Reforma.
Visitors were provided skeleton maps to navigate the city
showing only official routes. The “red” route (Avenida de los
Insurgentes), for example, linked the athletes’ housing to the
press hotel (Figure 12). Art critic John Canaday noted that
382    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
Figure 11  Map demonstrating
overlapping layers of Mexico 68
networks: competition venues, official
routes connecting them, transmissions
between satellite press centers, Susan
Breck Smith, designer, 1968 (from “TV y
cultura en los Juegos Deportivos de la XIX
Olimpiada,” México 68: Reseña Gráfica 33
[1968]).
“in Mexico City this fall you … can be illiterate in all lan­
guages, so long as you are not color blind.” At the same time
Chicano journalist Rubén Salazar of the Los Angeles Times
pointed out: “Wherever the visitor looks all is color …
shocking pink, purple, and yellow—temporarily hiding the
misery.”42
The MOC was not simply shielding visitors from the
less visually appealing (non-redeveloped) parts of Mexico
City. Indeed, residents could not be blamed for consulting
the information kiosks themselves. Mexico City had recently
emerged from the first major reorganization of its trans­
port infrastructure—dubbed El Proyectazo (“The Mega-­
Project”) by local press awestruck and skeptical in equal
­measure—that promised more efficient movement through­
out the city. Ernesto Uruchurtu, a presidentially appointed
regent (1952–66), pushed through long-proposed plans to
elongate and widen several of the city’s busiest streets, includ­
ing Paseo de la Reforma (1960–64), and to build new high­
ways, such as the Anillo Periférico (1961–67). This resulted
in the demolition of historically significant buildings and
division of poor neighborhoods (Morelos, Tepito, Guerrero)
and displacement of thousands of residents.43 The “rational­
ization” of such infrastructure projects complemented recent
Figure 12  Portion of Mexico 68 tourist road map indicating official routes and sites of interest, 1968 (courtesy of Cristobal Jácome Moreno).

efforts by architects aligned with the state and business inter­
ests to move the poor, small merchants and ambulant ven­
dors out of the city center to the periphery, freeing large
parcels for higher-value redevelopment.44
Not unlike Goeritz’s Ruta de la Amistad, Murdoch’s designs
for the MOC as well as Terrazas’s street furniture offered
new landmarks for a city transformed—if not estranged—
by high-speed urbanization and real estate speculation.
Indeed, their architectural and graphic “wayfinding” devices
attempted to supplement or fill in the gaps left by this partial
and uneven process of modernization.45 While these infra­
structural projects addressed specific urban problems (traffic
congestion, drainage, etc.), they also served as gestures of the
state’s magnanimity at a time when the speculative transfor­
mation of the capital city into a city of capital appeared
uncertain. Indeed, the success of these projects, which also

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incorporated social welfare infrastructure such as hospitals
and mass housing, depended as much on managing public
perception of this developmentalist agenda as on verifiable
improvement of Mexico’s urban fabric. In other words, this
infrastructure hailed a particular mode of vision that invited,
indeed insisted, that the public see continual progress guar­
anteed by a steward state and not witness its faltering legiti­
macy or rising inequity.46 Ramírez Vázquez explicitly denied
the role of abstract representation in his design practice,
asserting, “We are not artists. Architecture is not art—it is
not about just waiting to see what we come up with.” The
MOC trafficked in visual and verbal rhetoric, though.47
While tasked only to develop projects that met Olympic
requirements, the MOC responded to Mexico’s larger post­
revolutionary modernization agenda and should be under­
stood as part of a larger apparatus of image management by
the state that began in the early twentieth century.
Postrevolutionary Planning Milieu
Mexico participated in global diplomacy and economy,
but the eyes of the world had not collectively turned to it
since the Mexican Revolution, the first large sociopolitical
upheaval of the twentieth century. The revolution began as
an insurgent movement in 1910, seeking to oust the nearly
three-decade-long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, and quickly
morphed into a multifront civil war. Armed combat lasted
through 1920, but political instability and sporadic violence
continued for nearly another decade. Its participants, who
ranged from peasants to wealthy landowners and urban
­liberals, did not share a coherent ideology or even congru­
ent  interests. This left in shambles a country that had
not been socially or infrastructurally integrated prior to the
­revolution.48 The postrevolutionary state shakily emerged
before a strong sense of nation had evolved. The Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (and predecessor parties),
which dominated the political system from 1929, came to
power based on its claim of bringing stability, guaranteed
by populist but also authoritarian measures. Building the
nation then was the primary objective, taking the form of
reconstruction and a robust cultural nationalism. As such,
the political culture and visual senses of representation were
intertwined; the production and consumption of images
(and spaces, and audio), with the technologies facilitating this
encounter of nation and state, were and are central to the
everyday exercise and experience of power and citizenship in
Mexico.
Fairs, pageants, and other celebrations provide a com­
plex amalgam of design, technology, and performance that
anticipated many of the urban interventions for Mexico 68.
384    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
The paradigmatic case in Mexico is the 1910 Independence
Centennial event. The centennial spurred parties and marches
but fewer new buildings, monuments, and street improve­
ments (some still in place) than for Mexico 68. Events cen­
tered primarily on Porfirian Paseo de la Reforma, which
connected the city’s historic core to new upper-class residen­
tial subdivisions to the west, evidencing complementary and
competing notions of an ideal capital city, which had been
circulating since the late nineteenth century. Addressing
both elite and popular audiences through didactic messages
sometimes intended to elicit a sense of wonder, the centen­
nial demonstrated Mexico’s modernity and cosmopolitanism
precisely because it mixed and matched the indigenous with
national and international sources. The centennial pro­
vided, as Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo argued, a heady mixture of
“­capital speculation, trendy and ephemeral aesthetics, and
technological advancement.”49 Plans for the centennial
sprang from the idea of a universal exposition to educate the
city’s masses in the pleasures of consumption put forward by
Antonio A. de Medina y Ormaechea, founder of the Sociedad
Mexicana de Consumo (Mexican Consumption Society).50
The centennial events buttressed the legitimacy of the state
and elicited the expertise and opened the purses of elites who
proposed these projects, mapping out the borders between
its “ideal city” and the rest of Mexico City.
Architects and other cultural-economic elites aligned
with the state played a central role in shaping national culture
and communications throughout the postrevolutionary
period. Service to the nation-state was also service to the
profession. Beginning in the 1920s and intensifying in the
1930s, modernist architects—Enrique del Moral, Juan
O’Gorman, Carlos Obregón Santacilia, and others—made
the case for functionalism as the social basis for the country’s
reconstruction, promoting this as an efficient means given
the new state’s limited resources and desire to burnish its
fledgling legitimacy by drawing from international sources.
José Villagrán García, who for decades led the architec­
tural theory seminar, training generations of architects at the
­Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, advocated a
“social architecture” that drew explicit links between archi­
tect, state, and society.51 Seeking to stoke reconstruction, to
continue exploiting provincial resources, and to encourage
new consumer markets, the postrevolutionary state invested
heavily in communications infrastructure. Highways and
telephone lines built in the late 1920s through the 1950s
linked the hinterlands to Mexico City and beyond.52 The
communication needs of Mexico 68 hastened construction
of the next generation of integrative infrastructure: a network
of microwave relay stations to simulcast radio and television
produced in the capital.
 Terrazas’s official-route network for Mexico 68 might
be understood as a continuation of El Proyectazo and, before
that, Carlos Contreras’s “regulatory” or master plan for Mexico
City from the 1930s. Several of these plans were focused on
the transportation hub at the city’s historic core, calling for
widening several streets to improve circulation and sub­
sequently free up land for more lucrative redevelopment.
The transportation system’s “rationalization” required
demolishing colonial-era buildings and evicting thousands
of residents who lived and worked in the center.53 Urban
planning played a major role in the professionalization
of architecture in Mexico. Contreras and José Luis Cuevas,
who were Ramírez Vázquez’s mentors at the Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, were among the earliest
adopters of its methods, calling for the rationalization of
Mexico City’s transport infrastructure as the first and fore­
most step toward modernization.54 Like their counterparts
in Europe, planner-architects saw traffic (vialidad) as a medi­
ating category for housing, work, and recreation, with the
greatest potential to effect social transformation throughout
the city. This assumed the city to be transparent, its complex
system of inputs and outputs (people, goods, information,
and so forth) available for mapping and diversion. To achieve
this overarching goal, architects employed the technologies
available to them, including aerial photography, which gave
them the ability to recognize and represent urban patterns
in land use or transport.55 An urban-planning perspective
transformed the previously architectural image of Mexico
City’s land and structures into an infrastructural one: a city
composed of flows of plans, charts, diagrams, and photo­
graphs. In sum, aspects of the urban experience that had
­previously been understood as disparate and incommensu­
rable, if not unfathomable, appeared as a logically related,
manageable pattern.56
It was by assembling a vast array of representations
and claiming a larger field of intervention that modernist
planner-architects came into contact with other professionals
also seeking to expand their professional and social domain.
Planning called for the integration into the architectural
brief the information derived from topography and climate
as well as social sciences and other disciplines. The integración
plástica debates in Mexico highlight how architects and other
professionals negotiated the integration impulse. Originat­
ing in the 1930s, “plastic integration” was redefined in the
1950s in light of new technologies as well as the state’s shift­
ing spending priorities. Mexico came to world prominence
after the revolution with the murals of Diego Rivera, David
Alfaro Siqueiros, and other artists, many commissioned by
the federal government for its buildings. The subject matter
of these works sought to narrate the popular basis of the
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conflict and promote the new regime’s progressive creden­
tials.57 While muralism was privileged by the postrevolution­
ary state for a relatively short time, it came to be associated
with Mexican cultural nationalism (and weighed heavily on
artists who did not practice it).58 As architects began in the
1930s to successfully propose modernist designs for schools
and hospitals to the state, they also sought out the participa­
tion of artists. Mario Pani worked with several artists, among
them José Clemente Orozco and Carlos Mérida, for his
series of mass-housing projects (multifamilires) of the 1940s
through the 1960s. Ramírez Vázquez also invited several artists
to create works specifically for the Museo Nacional de Antro­
pología, including Goeritz. The participation of artists went
beyond merely superficial “Mexicanization” of modernist
architecture that was read as “foreign” through the use of local
iconography, however; it was not intended to be an equitable
collaboration.59 Plastic integration, as Pani and Ramírez
Vázquez deployed it, was a practice for explaining and endors­
ing the emerging role of architect as expert manager able to
make sense of urban complexity and marshal new technology
and a multidisciplinary team to posit solutions. As the state
shifted its patronage toward large-scale infrastructural proj­
ects, the expanded professional and social domain claimed by
the planner-architect appeared increasingly justified.
Urban Logistics
The MOC creative teams approached Mexico 68 with a
series of interrelated design projects. Planner-architects were
recognizing the deeper layers of complexity of cities and
were embracing tools that offered ways to visualize and reg­
ister this complexity. As Ramírez Vázquez posited, “Everything
has a program: ‘What is the concept? What is the function?
Is it doable in any given conditions?’ ”60 Terrazas agreed:
“A project of this nature is like an architecture project, it
must be shared and developed with the client, in order to
have the same expectations and achieve a good product.”61
Since the 1930s, architects in Mexico, as elsewhere, embraced
planning as a capacious category to effect urban change
beyond the scope of individual buildings to encompass whole
cities and regions but also on a smaller scale, visualizing a
continuum of social intervention. After World War II, they
sought to respond dynamically to urban processes that gave
cities their mutable shape, including human perception and
affect. The complexity of this system and its connectivity
further naturalized architecture’s links to other disciplines
and the need for multidisciplinary teams under the modern
architect’s supervision.
The MOC’s all encompassing design strategy did not
go unnoticed by the international press once the concerns
about Mexico’s “preparedness” were allayed. New York Times
art critic John Canaday took particular interest in their iden­
tity program, which resonated with his own interests, and
visited Mexico City at the end of 1967, filing several stories.
Having covered the New York World’s Fair for the news­
paper, he argued that design was now an “all-permeating”
aspect of international events, functioning as another arena
where countries (and corporations) could compete with
each other. There could be successes and failures. “Good”
(­modern) design, not unlike sports, had emerged as a univer­
sal endeavor with humanistic if not democratic qualities.
While Canaday praised Montreal’s Expo 67, he faulted
New York’s recent fair for its “debased and chaotic” design,
reflecting “everything that is tawdry and frustrating in our
city.”62 He was struck by the MOC’s general avoidance of
images typically deployed by “developing” countries to
announce their modernity to the world. Canaday wrote:
“Mexico is not to be presented in the usual way of photomon­
tage murals of factories, engineering projects, glass-walled
office buildings, and pretty children sitting in brand-new
schools.”63
Canaday was most impressed by the diversity, ubiquity,
and aesthetic cohesiveness of the MOC’s designs, which sug­
gested an ability to “control” many dynamic factors—a clear
mark of technical sophistication and thus modernity from his
metropolitan point of view. He wrote that “design, when the
Mexicans took a good look at the problem, went beyond the
business of posters, programs, advertisements and other self-
contained visual material and impinged on the area of urban
logistics.” For the art critic, Mexico represented a purer,
cleaner (and perhaps more conservative) version of modern­
ism, with the crassness of commercialism brushed aside, out
of view.64 Although only tangentially connected to Mexico’s
design culture and somewhat backhanded in his appraisal,
Canaday pointed to the dense tangle of new technologies,
discourses, and shifting modes of vision that informed the
MOC’s integrated approach, especially the tension between
communication and control and managerial impulse that still
permeated modernist design amid its wider reevaluation.
By the 1960s, architects began expressing disillusion­
ment with urban planning as a universal remedy, especially
its inability to cut through the ostensible chaos or entropy of
postwar life.65 Although urban planning aimed to pierce
through the complexity of cities, it could not respond in
timely fashion to the ever-shifting actors and processes
that gave cities their shape. An increasing number of archi­
tects looked to theories that proposed to provide feedback
so they could respond dynamically to systems as complex
as cities. Extrapolating from advances in computing and
communication as well as rethinking relations between humans
386    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
and machines and their environment, urban planning’s mode
of vision was shifted to compensate for these blind spots.
If the city was now understood as infrastructural, its flows
were tracked unidirectionally, with the planner-architect
unable to respond dynamically. Although personal comput­
ers were still years from wide use, increases in computing
capacity encouraged urbanists to work with greater amounts
of data that might more thoroughly account for the cities’
variable flows. Moreover, this technology advanced thinking
about feedback in several scientific and professional fields.
A web of theorists around the world, including Buckminster
Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Shadrach Woods, and Georges
Candilis, continued to transform CIAM theories of traffic
movement into thinking about ­networks. Terrazas, who
had worked for Woods, applied this ethos to his design
practice, using the Mexico City Olympics as a place to
experiment with many new approaches, eventually writing
about them for an anthology edited by artist and visual
theorist György Kepes, a champion of interdisciplinary
collaboration.66
Cybernetics, which explored feedback loops and con­
tinual self-regulation (toward homeostasis), was especially
enlightening to architects with interests in urban systems
communications. Norbert Wiener, who coined the term in
1948, was arguably the most influential proponent at the
time. A mathematician at MIT, Wiener worked with col­
leagues in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Mexico, includ­
ing neurophysiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, to figure out
how a network might not only integrate historical but also
real-time data to form a feedback loop to regulate itself
­continuously.67 The network would also have to determine
important information from background “noise” inherent
to the process. This technical problem had philosophical
implications for Wiener, who, disillusioned by war, often
wrote for nonspecialist audiences. He believed that people
sent messages within a system in an effort to familiarize
themselves with and control their environment in the face of
entropy.68 Taken to its logical end, networks would become
an extension of our bodies, and vice versa. Of course, while
this theory sought to produce networks capable of change,
they remained limited to situations whereby a node or user
must respect a system’s hierarchy of communication, leaving
it ill-equipped to respond to inputs not already preconceived
as part of its range. While basic research of cybernetics was
the result of wartime interests, defense was not its only
­output.69 Kepes, also at MIT, explored the human-machine-
environment nexus through the sciences and arts. He directed
the institute’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, which in
addition to serving as a hub for artists and scholars also
­sponsored large-scale, multisensory artworks incorporating
 processes in nature and accepting “the participation of
‘­spectators’ in such a way that art becomes a confluence.”70
Before coming to Cambridge in 1945, Kepes published
Language of Vision, in which he studied the effects of visual
­
elements, especially line and overall form, on human con­
sciousness.71 He saw visual communication, and design more
broadly, to be a universal language not in the abstract sense
but in terms of place and encounter. Kepes was influenced by
Gestalt psychologists who investigated perceptual experi­
ence and with whom he worked in Berlin prior to coming to
the United States. They held that the human eye sees an
object in its totality before perceiving its constitutive parts,
with the relationship between figure and ground allowing
the eye to make sense of objects amid visual cacophony.
Gestalt theorists also held, not unlike in cybernetics, that the
mind’s eye mediates between internal (bodily) and external
stimuli (worldly). Drawing examples from contemporary
graphic design and advertising, he explained: “Just as the
­letters of the alphabet can be put together in innumerable
ways to form words to convey meanings, so the optical mea­
sures and qualities can be brought together … and each parti­
cular relationship generates a different sensation of space.”72
Working in collaboration with Kevin Lynch, also at MIT,
Kepes further developed his interest in situatedness, both
spatial and perceptual. The two worked on a five-year field
research project that investigated the look of cities and
the mental images their users create through observation
and memory to navigate, whether on foot or in vehicles.73
Lynch published a beginning vocabulary for describing the
city’s “imageability” (nodes, paths, edges, districts, land­
marks); in other words, criteria for conceiving, communicat­
ing, and controlling a perceived environment holistically.74
Drawing a much thinner line between body and environ­
ment than his colleagues in Berlin, Kepes did not jettison
Gestalt psychology’s sense of discernment of pattern or
­hierarchy.75 Kepes, like Wiener, aspired to address broader
social issues through his research and promoted exchange
between experts in the arts and sciences to confront what
he saw as an impending ecological crisis.76 He also sought
to grant the arts the social agency that had been increas­
ingly reserved for the sciences. Perhaps the most concrete
­expression of this aim was his Vision + Value series, antholo­
gies he edited between 1965 and 1972 based on interdisci­
plinary seminars at MIT. He invited scientists, artists, and
humanists to contribute, and he illustrated the books with
images derived from scientific investigations that superseded
conventional views of the world (such as electron micro­
graphs).77 This interdisciplinary and technologically enhanced
mode of vision would, in Kepes’s estimation, lead to a
new environment in the total sense of the word. Socially
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minded artists and architects were increasingly recognizing
the environment—urban environments in ­particular—as an
“expanded field” of engagement.78
In an essay published four years after Mexico 68, Kepes
invited Terrazas to reflect on his design strategies for the
Olympics. The text appeared in Arts of the Environment
(1972), a later installment of the Vision + Value series, by
which time there was a critical mass of artists working
in this expanded field, including Robert Smithson and the
collective Pulsa in the United States, who also contributed
essays to the anthology.79 Compared to most of the contri­
butions, Terrazas’s essay was descriptive, even practical.
However, it did utilize several concepts shared by this
diverse, tenuous network of architects, artists, and theorists
reevaluating modernism.80 Terrazas explained that his brief
as MOC chief of urban design was twofold: first, “inform the
people of Mexico and the rest of the world of the progress
and spirit of the preparations”; and second, “create the kind
of physical setting that would function well and communi­
cate an organized, festive, modern Mexican spirit.”81 He also
understood Mexico City to be an environment shaped by
more than just the built environment or traffic. “Of the many
means of establishing and communicating an environment,”
he wrote, “we chose the creation of spaces, objects, and printed
matter.”82 Terrazas’s use of the word “spaces,” as opposed to
“architecture” or “city,” resonates with Kepes’s and Goeritz’s
expanded field.
Terrazas, not unlike his colleagues, was especially inter­
ested in the “correct scaling” of urban design elements for
Mexico 68, which signaled various design and professional
concerns. On the one hand, it signaled that the appropriate
medium for each aim or message was specifically chosen.
If the aim was ubiquity and the message was “Everything Is
Possible in Peace” (one of the Mexico 68 slogans), then plac­
ing the logo with an abstract dove on bumper stickers would
be the correct “scale.” On the other hand, scale allowed a
graduated spectrum of design choices, with various design
disciplines integrated to create environments. Scale also
­signaled the architect’s role in determining the relation­
ship between representation itself and what he sought to
­represent—the architect as mediator not only in the design
of structures but also in perception.
Terrazas’s essay points to problems of planning and
communication and to the more general problem of mediat­
ing between the overarching structure of the design scheme
(whole) and the individual (part), whether object or person.
In order to move people intellectually and emotionally, he
sought out a strategy of “unity and variety,” or a means of
allowing multiple teams to work independently without
compromising the identity program (overarching structure).
 “A framework had to be created,” he wrote, “within which
each individual could find his own expression, while at the
same time maintaining a unified image. … For the success of
our program, each person [designer] had to create but also
to respect, merge with, relate to, and integrate with the
whole, in order to achieve a united Mexico 68 environment.”83
Such a strategy assumed the existence of an overarching
­pattern or order, determined by designer (and/or patron),
that allowed room for maneuverability within predetermined
parameters. Not unlike Wiener’s first wave of cybernetics,
or Kepes’s and Lynch’s image of the city, Terrazas maintained
a renewed hope of holistic apprehension and continuity. For
modernist architecture and planning this meant that the
city could be fine-tuned toward an efficient and manage­
able whole as a product of visual and material syntax. While
Terrazas did not cite these authors, he referred to Serge
Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander’s Community and
Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism (1963), which
studied how human biological and social needs intersect with
the built environment.84
The reevaluation of modernism by new technologies
and the modes of environmental and collaborative thinking
they facilitated did not mean some of its central concepts
(pattern, control, expertise) were automatically abandoned
or that the process was entirely disinterested. The kinetic
environments put forth by MOC architects generally
­reinforced the architect’s role as manager, an approach that
served their reprofessionalization and the needs of their
­client. Terrazas would synthesize this scattered network of
ideas and the MOC’s various briefs most fully, if only
388    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
temporarily, for the committee’s display for the 14th Milan
Triennial held in 1968. Like the Olympic Center on Mexico
City’s Paseo de la Reforma, the Milan display housed evi­
dence of MOC’s creative output and also appeared to give it
shape: visitors walked into a three-dimensional version of
Wyman’s Mexico 68 logo.
Responsive Eyes
Located on the ground floor of Milan’s Palazzo dell’Arte, not
far from the main entrance, Terraza’s display hailed visitors
to the busy fair with a foot-to-ceiling reproduction of the
Mexico 68 logo (Figure 13). It was at least double the height
of its nearest neighbor, a display by Italian designer Marcello
Nizzoli, known for his work for Olivetti, the office equip­
ment maker. Visitors entered through a narrow aperture-like
passage in the wall to find themselves immersed in a three-
dimensional version of the very logo they had just seen
(­Figures 14 and 15). The rectangular perimeter of the exhibi­
tion space was modified to echo the sans serif curves of the
logo, and the logo’s alternating black-and-white lines were
applied not only to the walls and half walls but also to the
floor and ceiling. Terrazas described the exhibit: “Mexico 68
literally became the environment one entered, becoming
absorbed into the radiating black and white waves.”85 Because
the black-and-white lines were the same width, they continu­
ally altered the relationship between figure and ground,
appearing to activate a static space. Moving or shifting one’s
gaze only intensified this effect.86 At the same time, for visi­
tors well versed in global design, the architecturally hermetic
Figure 13  Entrance to Mexico 68 display
at the 14th Milan Triennial, Eduardo
Terrazas, designer; Lance Wyman, logo,
1968 (courtesy of Eduardo Terrazas).

Figure 14  Cover of Calli Internacional, architecture journal featuring
Milan Mexico 68 display (from Calli Internacional 34 [1968]; photograph
by Eumelia Hernández Vázquez).
Figure 15  Plan and section of Mexico 68 display at the 14th Milan Triennial (courtesy of Eduardo Terrazas).
R e s p o n s i v e E y e s : U r b a n L o g i s t i c s a n d K i n e t i c E n v i r o n m e n t s f o r t h e 1 9 6 8 M e x i c o C i t y Oly m p i c s     389
display opened a wide network of references to design theory
and practice. The dynamic lines gestured to Kepes’s Gestalt
understanding of line in Language of Vision and to op art but
also to Gae Aulenti’s interior for the Centro-Fly department
store in Milan. The furniture showroom opened two years
earlier with a display of thinner stripes in varying widths
and orientations. The 1966 display also made the leap from
architecture to film and fashion, referring to filmmaker
­William Klein’s Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (1966), a parody
of the excesses of the fashion industry. As the Milan display
made abundantly clear, the MOC’s integrated design
approach was meant to link Mexico to the wider world
through its location in Milan in front of fashion professionals
and through its knowing references to contemporary design,
wherein aesthetics migrated back and forth between van­
guard and commercial circuits at an ever-faster rate.
As a major showplace for vanguard as well as commer­
cial design, the Milan Triennial featured both individual
designers and collectives, including Kepes and Woods, as
well as national displays.87 A committee led by Italian archi­
tect Giancarlo De Carlo, a member of the Team X collective,
organized the triennial. De Carlo and his committee encour­
aged participation by Team X members to create environ­
ments and organized the exhibits thematically. The fair’s
overarching theme was “Il Grande Numero” (The Greater
Number), a gesture to mass production and consumption’s
role in shaping industrial societies. It critically gestured to
 design’s failure to benefit the wider world—but also the hope
for renewal through interdisciplinary collaboration and an
expanded (largely urban) field of intervention. A wider public
was also sought beyond the usual professional attendees.
As the title of Woods’s and artist Joachim Pfeuffer’s display
proposed, “Urbanism Is Everybody’s Business.”88
Although designed to surprise or even disorient visitors,
the labyrinth Mexico 68 exhibit also included an element
alerting them to the purposeful activation of the space:
a photograph of a crowd at a sporting event blown up to fit
a wall’s proportions. The spectators look past the camera’s
gaze, except for one person whose knowing smile alerts visi­
tors to their own uneasy spectatorship, literally inhabiting
Mexico 68 yet disconnected from their normal visual and
spatial habits and primed to adjust their perception, although
not necessarily on their own terms. To what end this gentle
perceptive coercion was evinced was not entirely clear.
­However, this optical and kinetic art–inspired environment
knowingly alluded to global currents. The triennial organizers’
appeal to openness elicited a response—although not exactly
as intended, bringing to light the fundamental unpredict­
ability of this strategy; the strategy also highlighted the
inability of some architects and designers to recognize the
limitations of their technologically enhanced vision. Social
unrest interrupted this total environment in Mexico. On the
day of the triennial’s inauguration, more than one hundred
students, artists, and intellectuals protested in front of the
Palazzo dell’Arte. De Carlo, who wanted to show that the
triennial’s theme was not superficially promoting the slogan
“The Greater Number,” invited the protesters inside to hear
their position. The protesters quickly occupied the triennial,
resulting in its closure. While the group’s demands were dif­
fuse, in general they criticized the organizing collective’s
continued embrace of design as a universal and ultimately
perfectible solution to the world’s social problems.89 They
were also skeptical of invitations by professional designers
to participate in the design or to serve as “active” participants
in encounters staged by kinetic environments. A leaflet dis­
tributed by some of the protestors included excerpts from
the last chapter of American critic Harold Rosenberg’s
anthology The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience
(1964). In this text (and others), Rosenberg explored with
skepticism the dilemma of art inviting participation in a
highly mediated consumer society; in his view, such an
exchange was infiltrated by psychological manipulation and
conformist bureaucracies. He wrote: “What can be foreseen
about creation is not its [finished] products but some of
the conditions under which it will take place.”90 On 8 June,
against De Carlo’s wishes, the police forcibly removed the
protestors, which prompted the resignation of the architect
390    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
and his committee. In light of Rosenberg’s opinion, as
r­ eactivated by the Milan protesters, what were the conditions
of production and consumption of the MOC display?
The MOC’s interpretation of “Il Grande Numero” fell
short of De Carlo’s and his colleagues’ proposal for staging
encounters between professionals and the public. Mexican
writer Juan Vicente Melo explained in a pamphlet publiciz­
ing the Milan display, “Me, you, him and her, we all form the
‘great number,’ that family that endeavors, always and in
every moment, to come closer to, and identify with each
other beyond all barriers imposed by language, geographic
distance or any kind of belief.”91 The MOC’s aim of exhibit­
ing at Milan was not to make a case for Mexico leading the
developed world in design but rather to argue that it was in
line with countries considered peers. The MOC spoke an
ostensibly universal language because Mexico saw itself as
part of the international “family.” Melo noted that Mexico 68
was not the product of just one man but of many architects,
designers, builders, writers, and translators: a multidisci­
plinary team working in the spirit of collaboration—albeit
centrally coordinated by the MOC. While the designer’s
responsibility to the “greater number” was debated in Milan,
the function of the designer as a mediator was not questioned
but reinforced. Network thinking did not equalize social
hierarchies. None of the MOC’s photographs or published
reports gave any indication of the unexpected disturbances
in Milan, just as they remained silent without comment on
the 1968 student movement and the October 2 massacre.
The social conditions and contradictions of Terrazas’s
display in Milan come into clearer focus when compared to
another MOC-sponsored exhibition in Mexico City as well
as unofficial happenings around 1968. What these experi­
mental exhibitions show is that participation can be staged in
more open-ended ways than those offered by the MOC’s
environments. In 1968, as part of the Cultural Olympiad in
Mexico City, Goeritz hosted Cinetismo: Esculturas electrónicas
en situaciones ambientales (Kineticism: Systems sculpture in
environmental situations) on a national university campus
at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, or MUCA,
at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.92 Orga­
nized by US-based curator and video artist Willoughby
Sharp, Cinetismo consisted of eighteen rooms featuring
kinetic and mixed-media artists from around the world.
Goeritz, who had arrived in Mexico in 1949 with extensive
international contacts, played a leading role in the globalization
of Mexico’s art and architecture and stoked interest in the
environment as a forum for intervention. Goeritz coedited the
arts supplement to Pani’s architectural journal Arquitectura/
México with art historian and critic Ida Rodríguez Prampolini.
The couple (married at the time) championed artists such
as André Bloc, the French engineer-artist and editor of
L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, who blurred boundaries between
sculpture and architecture.93 Goeritz and Rodríguez Pram­
polini promoted the originality of such neo-vanguard artists
in Paris, New York, or Mexico City, who like architects, were
questioning the relevancy of historical avant-gardes. In his
own sculpto-architectural work, Goeritz had turned away
from gallery-scaled objects in favor of staging interventions
that were most fully appreciated from a sidewalk or a moving
car. Goeritz had collaborated in 1957 with architect Luis
Barragán on a set of monumental towers, Torres de Satélite,
which announced the entrance to Ciudad Satélite (Satellite
City), a new bedroom community outside Mexico City
­master-planned by Pani (Figure 16). Barragán called the
­Torres a “símbolo plástico-publicitario,” pointing to a conflation
of sign, sculpture, and advertising.94
Goeritz’s opening remarks at the International Meeting
of Sculptors in Mexico City in 1968, which he organized as
part of the Cultural Olympiad, mapped a shifting landscape
for his peers, one in which urban concentration and new
technologies were upending the old aesthetic order and
­creating visual chaos. Goeritz bemoaned the isolation of art
from society: “Artists, instead of being invited to collaborate
with urban planners, architects and engineers, stand apart
R e s p o n s i v e E y e s : U r b a n L o g i s t i c s a n d K i n e t i c E n v i r o n m e n t s f o r t h e 1 9 6 8 M e x i c o C i t y Oly m p i c s     391
and produce only for a minority that visits art galleries and
museums. An art integrated from the very inception of the
urban plan is of fundamental importance in our age. This
means that artistic work will have to leave its environment of
art for art’s sake and establish contact with the masses by
means of total planning.”95 Goeritz’s artistic and rhetorical
proposals linked plastic integration in Mexico to the concur­
rent reevaluation of monumental sculpture-architecture in
Europe and the United States. Both artists and architects
looked to abstraction and color as a way to invest buildings
with greater cultural specificity after wartime destruction,
such as the “New Monumentality” advocated by critics
­Sigfried Giedion, José Luis Sert, and others.96 Visitors walk­
ing through Goeritz’s maze-like Cinetismo exhibition inter­
acted with the installations of Julio Le Parc’s hanging
movable aluminum strips set in motion as they moved
through (he won first prize at the Venice Biennial a year
before) and encountered Lucio Fontana’s spatial environ­
ment of looping neon. In Les Levine’s “Energy” room, elec­
trified bars emitted a mild shock when touched. The projects
were multisensory and extended beyond the art object
itself to occupy an entire room and involve the viewer by
shifting his perception or inviting him to touch, smell, and
so on (Figure 17). These installation artists were part of the
Figure 16  Torres de Satélite (Towers of
Satellite City), Mathias Goeritz and Luis
Barragán, architects, 1957 (from
México 68, no. 1 [Mexico City: Comité
Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX
Olimpiada, 1969]; photograph by
Michel Zabé).

Figure 17  Installation view with visitor to Heinz Mack’s installation
Light Forest Room, 1966–68, at Cinetismo: Esculturas electrónicas en
situaciones ambientales, Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte,
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City (from
Florencio Ruíz de la Peña, “Arte de energía y de movimiento,” El Sol de
México, 21 July 1968, 1, 13; courtesy of Centro de Documentación
Arkehia, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City).
neo-vanguard and neo-Dada, taking up and reforming
experiments first made by the historical avant-garde of the
1920s.97 These works were related to the happenings and
assemblage art of the same decade, proposing a new partici­
patory relationship between an increasingly dematerialized
object and an “empowered” viewer. Goeritz wrote in the
foreword to the exhibition’s catalogue: “Art has invaded the
fields of natural energy and technology. Air, water and fire,
accompanied by electric and magnetic power, gas and other
modern technical forces, have expanded the horizon of
the artist to establish a total environment in which man no
longer acts as a spectator but as a participant in the work
of art.”98
Kinetic environments created by these artistic inter­
ventions suggested that space was not an inert stage but was
energized by viewers and reciprocally, forcefully communi­
cative.99 It was this forcefulness, if not verging on violence,
of the energy at the moment of expression that would send
shock waves throughout the art world, creating a “less trivial
future.” This forcefulness was amplified by the exhibition’s
location. MUCA was located on the university’s main espla­
nade, across from the rector’s tower, where members of
the student-led democratization movement met regularly,
holding demonstrations and informal festivals on Sundays.
During these festivals, artists affiliated with Mexico’s vanguard
392    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
scene, who were either students or supported the movement,
collaboratively painted what they called the “Ephemeral
Mural.” The artists, including José Luis Cuevas (no relation
to the aforementioned planner-architect), Benito Messeguer,
Fanny Rabel, Manuel Felguérez, Lilia Carrillo, Alfredo Car­
dona Chacón, and Roberto Denís, painted on a corrugated metal
shed erected over the ruins of a statue of former president
Miguel Alemán, the target of student displeasure at demon­
strations in 1960 and 1966. Alemán had inaugurated the new
campus with great fanfare in 1954 as a showplace of modern­
ist architecture and art, documented extensively in the
domestic and international press. The 1968 mural’s title
referred to the assumption of its creators that it would not
permanently remain but also was related to the so-called
Mexican school of painting’s influence. The nationalist
murals of Rivera, Siqueiros, and company were perceived to
have a dampening effect on artistic experimentation in Mex­
ico; Cuevas would publish a short story in 1956 describing
the situation as like living behind a “cactus curtain.”100 To
this end, the “Ephemeral Mural” did not offer a coherent
composition or subject matter but a collage of ­subjects and
styles that estranged the expectations of the seemingly hege­
monic genre. Art critic Raquel Tibol noted: “The whole
thing looked like a collage of paintings, some of which made
no reference to the events that were growing increasingly
tragic with every day, although some did depict those events
in an eloquent way. [Gustavo] Arias Murueta, for example,
hung a torn-up doll with colored string hanging from its
stomach; this little object paid homage to a young girl who
had died with her guts exposed on August 28, during an act
of repression in the Zócalo [Mexico City’s central plaza].”101
By applying three-dimensional objects to the ridged surface
they dematerialized the traditional art object, foregrounding
its conceptual operation over its value as ­commodity.
Le Parc, whose work was also the subject of a solo exhibition
at the Palacio de Bellas Artes a month earlier, told Mexico
City journalists that spectators of kinetic art “stopped being
unconscious accomplices to the status quo and rediscovered
their capacity to produce, create.”102 Goeritz and Le Parc’s
gestures to kinetic and participatory art’s ­revolutionary
potential did not foreclose other uses and receptions. Art
critics and historians have commented extensively on the
instability of optical and kinetic art’s visual dynamism as well
as its politics. As art critic Dave Hickey has suggested, op art
frustrated any criticism that presumed to interpret the object
as “properly seen.”103
Only a year earlier young Cuevas, who was establishing
himself as an artistic provocateur, unveiled an “Ephemeral
Mural” at the corner of Genova and Londres Streets in the
city’s fashionable Zona Rosa neighborhood, near Paseo de la
Reforma. In June 1967, Cuevas unveiled a rented billboard
before the eyes of members of the media he had carefully
cultivated, and anyone else who would attend, that promi­
nently featured a self-portrait and his signature and was
scheduled for obsolescence a month later.104 The portability
of the title, the ambiguity of Cuevas’s project—at once a
­critique of the artistic scene and self-promotion—all appro­
priated the language of advertising and involved an audience,
highlighting the fundamental instability of kinetic and parti­
cipatory encounters from the production side, which under
the banner of the MOC had been treated as controlled
experiments.105
Conclusion
The challenges of hosting a technically and logistically
­complex international mega media event like the modern
Olympics required what American art critic Canaday identi­
fied as “urban logistics,” or the ability to integrate and mobi­
lize various design disciplines to produce a seamless and
competitive image of a nation’s technological modernity for
worldwide consumption.106 The MOC’s Olympic Center
lobby, their modular and portable information towers and
kiosks, and their immersive logo at the Milan triennial most
clearly demonstrate this logistical but also rhetorical impera­
tive. These environments, designed by Terrazas and his col­
leagues, cited global design, art, and technology, whether
explicitly acknowledged or not, to overcome the lingering
perception that Mexico, a still-modernizing country and
first Latin American host, was ill-prepared to execute the
Olympics. The design strategies “surprised” user-beholders
with immersive and interactive environments that estranged
visual and spatial perceptions and invited participation in
completing or transforming the space, staging a kinetic expe­
rience that could intervene on perception of the space but
also make the MOC’s case for Mexico’s networked contem­
poraneity. This is a key reason why Mexico 68 and its neo-
vanguard aesthetics remain a touchstone in global design
history for its coherency and synthesis, from architecture
to visual communication. In fact, the Olympics are usually
the only mention of Mexico in design history textbooks.107
As architectural historians using mostly Euro-American
examples have argued, the transition from modernism to
postmodernism was not sudden—a matter of disillusionment
leading directly to abandonment. Modernism was reevalu­
ated and in many cases renewed through the adoption of
(and continued hope in) technological progress. Scientific
investigation, technology, and the modes of vision offered by
these advances, some the product of wartime research, were
utilized by architects and artists in what might be called a
R e s p o n s i v e E y e s : U r b a n L o g i s t i c s a n d K i n e t i c E n v i r o n m e n t s f o r t h e 1 9 6 8 M e x i c o C i t y Oly m p i c s     393
“second modernism.” In Mexico, because of the historical
enmeshing between modernist architects, the state, and busi­
ness interests, this shift was not so much a moment of crisis
as an opportunity to expand the range of modern architec­
ture’s professional and its social domain, despite technologi­
cal change and challenges to the country’s political stability.
A close look at the MOC’s kinetic environments and their
aesthetics and linked discourses reveals that notions of inter­
disciplinary collaboration, Gestalt wholeness, ecological
interconnectivity, and cybernetic responsiveness also exhib­
ited frameworks of hierarchy, management, and the cult of
expertise. Terrazas and colleagues picked and chose from
domestic and international sources for material, transform­
ing what was communicated from and to sources in the pro­
cess, not unlike the reciprocal expectations of audiences.
Global networks did not deliver an unfettered flow of infor­
mation and technology so much as serve as a compelling
metaphor for reinforcing the authority of key professional
mediators who helped to define its circuits.
Notes
1. Translations are by the author unless otherwise noted. The routes were
also outfitted with telephone lines and portable radio antennas, while mul­
tilingual hostesses (edecanes) stationed at the kiosks offered directions and
police monitored traffic, facilitating the uninterrupted flow of automobiles
and official information. Archive of the Comité Organizador de los Juegos
de la XIX Olimpiada, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, box 43,
folder 7-78.
2. Eduardo Terrazas and Beatrice Trueblood estimated that “an interna­
tional team of some 250 writers, designers, photographers, and production
people … created 842 publications (pamphlets, bulletins, posters), in three
languages: more than 16 million copies.” Terrazas and Trueblood, “Letters
Eye 59: This Is Not Mexico,” Eye 59 (2006), http://www.eyemagazine.com
/opinion.php?id=130&oid=455 (accessed 1 Aug. 2013).
3. The “Miracle” ran from roughly 1940 to 1970. The government’s import
substitution policies sought to stoke a domestic consumer market and an
industrial base simultaneously. This attracted sizable foreign investment,
but real income rose modestly or fell for most Mexicans over this period.
Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer, In the Shadow of the Revolution:
Contemporary Mexican History, 1910–1989 (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1993).
4. That Mexico was not aligned with either NATO countries or the
­Communist bloc was also attractive to voters. For the politics of Olympic
host selection, see Kevin B. Witherspoon, Before the Eyes of the World: Mexico
and the 1968 Olympic Games (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
2008).
5. Carolina Rivas and Daohud Sarhandi, “This Is 1968 … This Is Mexico,”
Eye 56 (2005), http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=123&fid=539
(accessed 1 Aug. 2013).
6. María Josefa Ortega and Tania Ragasol, eds., Diseñando México 68:
Una identidad olímpica (Mexico City: Museo de Arte Moderno, 2008),
26. Emphasis mine.
7. The Mexico 68 logo bears more than a passing resemblance to British
artist Bridget Riley’s undulating painting reproduced on the cover of the
 exhibition’s catalogue. Interview of Wyman moderated by Fernando Leal,
“Diseño y comunicación gráfica en las Olimpiadas, 1966–1971: Lance
Wyman,” Sub-versiones de la memoria … 60–70 … México, DVD, vol. 4
(Mexico City: Centro de Documentación Arkehia, Museo Universitario
Arte Contemporáneo, 2011). By 1968, several major exhibitions on optical
and kinetic art were staged globally. See John Houston, ed., Optic Nerve:
Perceptual Art of the 1960s (New York: Merrell, 2007).
8. John Canaday, “Designing the 1968 Olympics—the Biggest Fiesta of
All,” New York Times, 31 Dec. 1967, 67.
9. Among the most exhaustively researched studies of Mexico 68 are
Claire Brewster and Keith Brewster, Representing the Nation: Sport and
­Spectacle in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2010); Cris­
tobal Jácome Moreno, “Fábrica de imágenes arquitectónicas: El caso de
México en 1968,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 32, no. 96
(2010), 77–107; Eric Zolov, “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow’: Mexico
and the 1968 Olympics,” The Americas 61, no. 2 (2004), 161–62; Ariel
Rodríguez Kuri, “El otro 68: Política y estilo en la organización de los
juegos olímpicos de la ciudad de México,” Relaciones 19, no. 76 (1998),
107–30.
10. The MOC countered with another public relations campaign, publish­
ing a trilingual 180-page book on the matter, The City of Mexico: The Myth
of Altitude (1967), to reiterate available evidence. It also opened the athletes’
residences well before the opening ceremony to allow for their acclimation.
The Mexican press was also skeptical. See Claire Brewster and Keith
­Brewster, “Mexico City 1968: Sombreros and Skyscrapers,” in National
Identity and Global Sports Events: Culture, Politics, and Spectacle in the Olympics
and the Football World Cup, ed. Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).
11. On the art-student propaganda bridges, see Daniel Librado
Luna Cárdenas, La ­Academia de San Carlos en el movimiento estudiantil
de 1968 (Mexico City:  Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
2008).
12. The 2 October massacre remains a flashpoint in contemporary Mexican
public culture. Its chief architect, interior minister Luis Echeverría, has
evaded criminal prosecution to this day. For an English-language survey of
the 1968 student-led democratization movement, see Elaine Carey, Plaza of
Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 2005). Mexico 68 is also associated with social unrest
in other participating countries. See, e.g., Amy Bass, Not the Triumph but
the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete
(­Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
13. Medical students and residents went on strike in 1964–65 and railroad
workers in 1958–59; both movements were violently repressed by Díaz
Ordaz, then interior minister.
14. On the politics of Ramírez Vázquez’s selection, see Ariel Rodríguez
Kuri, “Hacia México 68: Pedro Ramírez Vázquez y el proyecto olímpico,”
Secuencia 56 (2003), 37–73.
15. As Luis Castañeda recently stated, the MOC’s interventions intersected
with long-term urbanization plans advocated by the government, planner-
architects, and private interests. Luis M. Castañeda, “Choreographing the
Metropolis: Networks of Circulation and Power in Olympic Mexico,”
­Journal of Design History 25, no. 3 (2012), 285–303. He builds on Diane
Davis’s argument that these actors often occupied multiple and competing
roles in this process. Davis, Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth
Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). See also Castañeda’s
Spectacular Mexico: Design, Propaganda, and the 1968 Olympics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
16. Calli Internacional: Revisita Analítica de Arquitectura Contemporánea
35 (1968), 17.
394    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
17. Wigley notes the “narcissistic self-reflection” of this discourse. Mark
Wigley, “Network Fever,” Grey Room 4 (2001), 82–122.
18. The flexibility of postwar design should not be understood solely as a
response to changes in technologies or client needs. This teamwork ethos
also served the requirements of post-Fordist economies and the unevenly
developed economies of the global south. See Hal Foster, Design and Crime
(And Other Diatribes) (New York: Verso, 2002), 23. Recent theories about
mega media events and global cities have sharpened our understanding of
the modern Olympics as a multisite and highly mediated phenomenon with
transnational flows and with large, mostly virtual audiences. See Nicholas
Couldry, Andreas Hepp, and Friedrich Krotz, eds., Media Events in a Global
Age (New York: Routledge, 2009). At the same time, Olympic narratives
remain largely fragmented, with architecture, urban planning, art, and
media treated separately, even as the division of labor required their syn­
thesis. Jilly Traganou also points to the divide between Olympic histories
and those situated within academic disciplines. Traganou, “Foreword:
Design Histories of the Olympic Games,” Journal of Design History 25,
no. 3 (2012), 245–51.
19. A special issue of Pani’s journal was published to coincide with the
congress (Arquitectura/México 39 [Sept. 1952]). See also Mario Pani and
Enrique del Moral, La construcción de la Ciudad Universitaria del Pedregal:
Concepto, programa y planeación arquitectónica (Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, 1979).
20. Referring to the perceived coldness of early functionalist architecture,
Grove argued that a machine aesthetic was no longer desirable. He saw
­Mexican architecture leading the way to addressing “subtler human needs
that are so much more difficult to satisfy: the need for poetry, for spiritual
liberation, for better possibilities of nonregimented, personal individual
growth.” Guillermo Rossell de la Lama and Lorenzo Carrasco, eds., Guía
de arquitectura mexicana contemporánea (Mexico City: Editorial Espacios,
1952), unpaginated.
21. Terrazas was unlike Ramírez Vázquez, who was prone to hyperbole that
distorted influences and affinities originating outside Mexico, insisting that
the Mexico 68 logo was inspired by ethnic Huichol design that employed
concentric lines and saturated colors. The chairman also actively managed
MOC’s legacy by creating the archive held by the Archivo General de
la Nación, which is a fundamental resource for research on Mexico 68,
­claiming copyright of documentary images and, before his death in 2013,
curating a major exhibition, Diseñando México 68: Una identidad olímpica
(2008). This exhibition focused on the identity program and continued to
deemphasize the tension between design and politics in 1968. Eduardo
­Terrazas and ­Beatrice Trueblood also have attempted to manage public
memory; see ­Terrazas and Trueblood, “Letters Eye 59: This Is Not
Mexico.”
22. After studying at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
­Terrazas pursued a master’s in architecture at Cornell University, graduat­
ing in 1960. From upstate New York, he went to Rome. While there, he was
invited by cultural ambassador Fernando Gamboa to aid in the design for
a major state-sponsored exhibition of Mexican art in Leningrad. He later
worked in the London office of Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis and
the Paris office of Candilis Josic Woods.
23. Putting aside the notion that there existed a singular “first” or “second”
modernism, see Arindam Dutta, ed., A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture,
and the “Techno-Social” Moment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013). See
also Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and
Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013); Sarah Williams
Goldhagen and Rejean Legault, eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation
in Postwar Architectural Cultures (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press for the
Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2001).
24. “Television Team of 464 Is Largest at Olympics,” New York Times,
13 Oct. 1968.
25. Mauricio Gómez Mayorga, “La arquitectura contemporánea en
México: Notas polémicas,” Artes de México 36 (1961), 18.
26. Archive of the Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada,
Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, box 533, folder 37-120.
27. Juan Vicente Melo, Juan García Ponce, and Ralph Meyers, editorial,
México 68: XIX Olimpiada 9 (1968), 3.
28. He did the same for a stamp showing a new headquarters tower for
the Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Transporte. The radiating pattern
was also used on the esplanade of Estadio Olímpico (Olympic Stadium),
just as the logo was reproduced in three dimensions using concrete and
also inflatable Mylar balloons at the athletes’ residential complex and other
sites.
29. The Olympics Center architects were Luis McGregor Krieger,
­Francisco J. Serrano, José Rava Requesens, and Fernando Pineda.
30. An important early example is Olivetti’s store on New York’s Fifth
Avenue retail corridor (1954), which invited customers to interact with the
merchandise. This was one of several showrooms created for the company
by leading designers (often in collaboration with artists). See “Olivetti:
Design in Industry,” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 20, no. 1 (1952);
“­Candid Photos of Sidewalk Typists Show Some Candid Writing,” Life,
11 Apr. 1955, 16.
31. The floors above housed hospitality facilities, including a conference
room equipped for simultaneous translation and film projection, a ­reception
hall with an adjacent outdoor patio, and apartments for guests of the
committee.
32. See Luis M. Castañeda, “Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics
at Mexico ’68,” Grey Room 40 (2010), 100–126. Also, in the 1950s and 1960s,
Mexican architect Juan José Díaz Infante experimented with reinforced
polymers as a building material. See Díaz Infante, “Una proyección hacia
la arquitectura dinámica,” Arquitectura/México 93 (Mar. 1966), 36.
33. Working at Nelson’s New York office in the 1960s, Terrazas may have
been familiar with the design. On Nelson, see Stanley Abercrombie, George
Nelson: The Design of Modern Design (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
34. Eduardo Terrazas, “Creation of Environment: Mexico 68,” in Arts of
the Environment, ed. György Kepes (New York: George Braziller, 1972), 205.
35. Both DuPont and British Industrial Plastics, working with local
­partners, were active in Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s.
36. The graphic design for the paper chair was charged to Wyman.
37. Katsumi Masaru and Yamashita Yoshiro oversaw visual communication
for the Tokyo Olympics. México 68, no. 4 (Mexico City: Comité Organiza­
dor de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada, 1969), 346.
38. The main press center, run by the Italian office-equipment-maker
Olivetti, was said to possess 200 typewriters with 30 different types of
­keyboards, 90 televisions, 70 long-distance telephone booths, and a film-
developing laboratory. Not including transport infrastructure that was paid
for by other state agencies, communications spending amounted to almost
23 percent of the MOC’s total budget. Aspectos Económicos de los Juegos de la
XIX Olimpiada, Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada,
Mexico City, 1969.
39. México 68, no. 1 (Mexico City: Comité Organizador de los Juegos de
la XIX Olimpiada, 1969), 30. These breathless descriptions recall David
Nye’s notion of the “technological sublime.” David E. Nye, American
­Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
40. Rodríguez Kuri, “Hacia México 68,” 59.
41. Néstor Garciá Canclini, ed., La ciudad de los viajeros: Travesías e imagi-
narios urbanos, México, 1940–2000 (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana Iztapalapa, 1996), 29.
R e s p o n s i v e E y e s : U r b a n L o g i s t i c s a n d K i n e t i c E n v i r o n m e n t s f o r t h e 1 9 6 8 M e x i c o C i t y Oly m p i c s     395
42. Canaday, “Designing the 1968 Olympics,” 67; Rubén Salazar,
“­Wonderland of Color,” Los Angeles Times, 13 Oct. 1968, 8.
43. Several of the city’s rivers were also diverted into pipes and paved over
with highways, including the Río de la Piedad, aiding with recurrent drain­
age issues but also displacing residents.
44. Mario Pani envisioned such displaced residents living in new “satellite”
cities orbiting around the core. What this plan did not account for was the
rise of self-constructed housing for rural migrants on the city’s periphery.
Pani, “Satélite: La ciudad fuera de la ciudad,” Arquitectura/México
60 (1957), 215–26.
45. The use of pictograms also aided illiterate residents, as in the Mexico
City subway, although more literate and cosmopolitan audiences were the
likely target.
46. See George F. Flaherty, “Tlatelolco recalcitrante, yuxtaposiciones
­incómodas/Uncanny Tlatelolco, Uncomfortable Juxtapositions,” in ­Desafio
de la estabilidad: Procesos artísticos en México, 1952–1967/Defying Stability:
Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952–1967 (Mexico City: Museo ­Universitario
de Arte Contemporáneo, 2014), 400–417.
47. Ortega and Ragasol, Diseñando México 68, 219.
48. Citizens tended to privilege local and regional identifications over
national. For a synthesis of the revolution, see Alan Knight, The Mexican
Revolution: Counter-Revolution and Reconstruction (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1990).
49. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012), 36.
50. Ibid., 8. Another centennial was staged in 1921. Certain approaches to
the appropriation of indigenous culture (indigenismo) were pioneered at the
event, contributing to an emerging repertoire of art, literature, dance, and
music that were institutionalized over time based on the assumption that
culture should be subsumed under the banner of the nation and administered
by elites. See Rick A. López, Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and
the State after Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010);
­Shelley E. Garrigan, Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation
of National Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
51. José Villagrán Garcia was informed in part by nineteenth-century
French architect Julian Gaudet. He began his seminars in 1924, publishing
his lectures as a book, Teoría de la arquitectura (Mexico City: Instituto de
Bellas Artes, 1962). See Kathryn E. O’Rourke, “Guardians of Their Own
Health: Tuberculosis, Rationalism, and Reform in Modern Mexico,” JSAH
71, no. 1 (Mar. 2012), 60–77.
52. Wendy Waters, “Remapping Identities: Road Construction and
Nation-Building in Postrevolutionary Mexico,” in The Eagle and the Virgin:
Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940, ed. Mary K. Vaughan
and Stephen E. Lewis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).
This infrastructure also played an important role in developing Mexico’s
tourism industry, which Mexico 68 served in part. Dina Berger, The
­Development of Mexico’s Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
53. These plans were ultimately abandoned. For the architectural establish­
ment’s point of view, see Vladimir Kaspé, Mauricio Goméz Mayorga, et al.,
“Crítica de ideas arquitectónicas, suplemento periódico de debate y planteo
de problemas no. 13: El problema del centro de la Ciudad de México,”
Arquitectura/México 71 (1960), 67–74.
54. The first conference on urban planning in Mexico, the National
­Congress of Cities and Regions, presided over by Cuevas, was held in 1926,
and three years later, Contreras conducted the first urban-planning study
for the Ministry of Communications and Public Works. Urbanism was
taught at the national architecture school beginning in 1930, led by Cuevas,
Federico E. Mariscal, and Luis R. Ruíz.
55. Several architects decorated their offices with bird’s-eye views of
­Mexico City. On the use of the aerial image, see Francisco Antúnez Echega­
ray, “La foto-topografía aérea y sus aplicaciones prácticas,” Planificación 1,
no. 5 (1928), 13.
56. Architectural journals played an important role. Planner-architect
Mario Pani founded and edited Mexico’s influential journal Arquitectura/
México. On Pani’s role in fomenting a more international Mexican archi­
tecture, see George F. Flaherty, “Mario Pani’s Hospitality: Latin America
through Arquitectura/México,” in Latin American Modern Architectures:
Ambiguous Territories, ed. Patricio del Real and Helen Gyger (New York:
Routledge, 2012), 251–69.
57. While Rivera and Siqueiros, in particular, emphasized the murals’ pub­
lic mode of address and graphic immediacy, few murals were truly acces­
sible, since most citizens did not visit government offices.
58. See Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, ed., Muralismo mexicano, 1920–40:
Crónica y catálogo razonado, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2013); Mary K. Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official
Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2012).
59. This is not to say that artists did not play a decisive role, especially in
published debate. Siqueiros, who adapted to the changing patterns of
patronage and adopted new technologies much quicker than his muralist
colleagues—perhaps in order to salvage the legacy of muralism—was a
major proponent. See, e.g., David A. Siqueiros, “Habla Siqueiros,” Arqui-
tectura/México 30 (1950), 294–96.
60. Ortega and Ragasol, Diseñando México 68, 219.
61. Ibid., 219, 226.
62. Canaday, “Designing the 1968 Olympics,” 67.
63. Ibid.
64. Canaday was not an especially progressive critic; he relished taking a
reactionary position against abstract expressionism in New York. See John
Canaday, Embattled Critic: Views on Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Cudahy, 1962).
65. For the United States and Europe, see Magali Sarfatti Larson, Behind
the Postmodern Façade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century
­A merica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Chrisopher
Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from
New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
66. Terrazas, “Creation of Environment: Mexico 68,” in Kepes, Arts of the
Environment. Terrazas left Woods for the New York office of George
Nelson, where he met Wyman and worked on the pop art–inspired Chrysler
pavilion for the New York World’s Fair (1964–65). He also worked for
Ramírez Vázquez as the on-site architect for the Mexican pavilion at the fair.
67. A five-year Rockefeller Foundation grant allowed them to travel back
and forth between Mexico and MIT starting in 1946. After that Wiener
regularly lectured in Mexico. Arturo Rosenblueth, Nobert Wiener, and
Julian Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,” Philosophy of Science 10,
no. 1 (1943), 18–24. For a thorough primer on cybernetics, see Christine
M. Boyer, “The Two Orders of Cybernetics in Urban Form and Design,”
in Companion in Urban Design, ed. Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-
Sideris (New York: Routledge, 2001), 70–83.
68. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the
­Animal and the Machine (New York: J. Wiley, 1948). Architectural critic
Sigfried Giedion shared Wiener’s and Kepes’s interest in homeostatic sys­
tems in his Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1948). See also Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First
Machine Age (New York: Praeger, 1960).
69. An alternate theory of “whole design” also emerged from countercul­
tural ecology, one that sought to eschew determinism. See Simon Sadler,
396    j s a h / 7 3 : 3 , S e p t e m b e r 2 014
“An Architecture of the Whole,” Journal of Architectural Education 61,
no. 4 (2008), 108–29. See also Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-
Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010); Larry
Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970 (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).
70. Quoted from one of their pamphlets in The Center for Advanced Visual
Studies: A Brief History, ed. Elizabeth Finch (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
n.d.), http://cavs.mit.edu/MEDIA/CenterHistory.pdf (accessed 1 Aug.
2013).
71. György Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944).
72. Ibid., 13, 23.
73. The project led to the publication of Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960).
74. György Kepes, “Art and Ecological Consciousness,” in Kepes, Arts
of the Environment, 3.
75. He also continued to presume a fairly fixed relationship between signs
and meaning.
76. Wiener and Kepes had some interaction, although they were not close
colleagues. The former contributed a short essay to The New Landscape in
Art and Science (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1961), which Kepes edited, and
provided illustrations.
77. The titles of the original six anthologies for the Vision + Value series
published by George Braziller, New York, indicate the breadth of subjects:
Education of Vision, Structure in Art and Science, The Nature and Art of Motion,
Module Proportion Symmetry Rhythm, Sign Image Symbol, and The Man-Made
Object.
78. Rosalind Krauss wrote of an “expanded field” for sculpture in this
period; see Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (1979),
30–44.
79. Terrazas, “Creation of Environment: Mexico 68,” in Kepes, Arts of the
Environment.
80. Kepes and Terrazas met in 1961 in Rome. Eduardo Terrazas, personal
communication, 9 Apr. 2014.
81. Terrazas, “Creation of Environment: Mexico 68,” in Kepes, Arts of the
Environment, 198.
82. Ibid., 206. Terms such as “space” and “environment” had increasing
currency in Mexico and abroad.
83. Similarly, Kepes wrote in his introduction to Arts of the Environment:
“Buildings and groups of buildings are no longer considered sculptural
forms and their space-organizations, but rather as systems of functions,
programming life patterns with the participation of those concerned” (11).
84. Terrazas also credits one of his mentors at Cornell, Alan R. Solomon,
an art critic and curator who founded and led the Dickson White Art
Museum at Cornell University, for the prominence of color in his methods.
Solomon was a key figure in the promotion of pop art and staged important
early exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Author inter­
view (with Luis Castañeda) of Eduardo Terrazas, 26 June 2009.
85. Terrazas, “Creation of Environment: Mexico 68,” in Kepes, Arts of
the Environment, 205.
86. Terrazas has referred to the Milan display as a “total” space. Videotaped
interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist (18 June 2013), http://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=33sqtYrgglw.
87. Kepes, in collaboration with Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas McNulty,
created City by Night, a kinetic installation in a corridor-like space formed
by a dark-colored and perforated false ceiling through which lights shone
intermittingly, accompanied by recorded urban sounds.
88. The theme of the previous triennial was “Free Time” and featured
several displays with a pop art sensibility, which was looked back upon as
frivolous. “Il Grande Numero” (The Greater Number) might be a play on
“Habitat du Plus Grand Nombre” (Habitat for the Greatest Number), the
name for informal settlements in colonial Algeria and Morocco from
ATBAT-Afrique and presented by Candilis and Michel Ecochard at the
1953 CIAM meeting in Aix-en-Provence, which had a strong Team X
­presence. See Paola Nicolin, “Beyond the Failure: Notes on the XIVth
Triennale,” Log 13–14 (2008), 87–100.
89. Three of Milan’s universities had seen protests, and the May 1968 Paris
general strike was ongoing. See Paola Nicolin, “Protest by Design:
Giancarlo De Carlo and the 14th Milan Triennale,” in Cold War Modern:
Design, 1945–1970, ed. David Crowley and Jane Pavitt (London: V & A
Publishing, 2008), 228–33.
90. Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience
(New York: Horizon Press, 1964), 258.
91. Juan V. Melo, “XIV Triena de Milan,” Reseña Gráfica Mexico 68, no. 40
(1968), 3.
92. For a complete analysis of the Cinetismo show, see Jennifer Josten,
“Mathias Goeritz y el arte internacional de nuevos medios en la década de
1960,” in Ready media: Arqueología de los medios e invención en México, ed.
Karla Jasso and Tania Aedo (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas
Artes, 2012), 118–32.
93. In this article, Rodríguez Prampolini distinguishes between integra­
tion and “true” or “total” integration, with the later being more difficult
to attain in such a highly individualistic era and also because the artist
and architect, as individuals, are not united by a common aesthetic sensi­
bility. Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, “Integración total de Andre Bloc,”
Arquitectura/México 80 (1962), 291–93. On Goeritz’s larger role in the
internation­alizaton of Mexican art and architecture as well as coverage of
Rodríguez ­Prampolini, see Jennifer Josten, “Mathias Goeritz and Inter­
national ­Modernism in Mexico, 1942–1962” (PhD diss., Yale University,
2012).
94. “La propiedad artística de las Torres de Satélite,” Plural: Revista Cultural
de Excélsior 48 (Sept. 1975), 84; Mathias Goeritz, “Highway Sculpture: The
Towers of Satellite City,” Leonardo 1 (1970), 319–22. Beginning in 1968 in
Paris, this journal was edited by Frank Malina, an American engineer and
artist with an interest in kinetic art. In addition to the Torres de Satélite and
the Ruta de la Amistad, Goeritz experimented with his Kunsthalle Museo
Experimental El Eco, which opened in 1953. With this project, he launched
his “emotional architecture,” meant to arouse, if not overwhelm, the emo­
tions of visitors in a space to house a spiritual synthesis of the arts. See
Goeritz, “Manifesto de la Arquitectura Emocional,” Cuadernos de Arquitec-
tura 1 (Mar. 1954). See also Daniel Garza Usabiaga, Mathias Goeritz y la
arquitectura emocional: Una revisión crítica (Mexico City: Instituto de Bellas
Artes y Literatura, 2012).
95. Quoted in Karel Wendl, “The Route of Friendship: A Cultural/Artistic
Event of the Games of the XIX Olympiad in Mexico City, 1968,” Olympika:
The International Journal of Olympic Studies 7 (1998), 115. Wendl was secre­
tary to the International Meeting of Sculptors.
96. See Sigfried Giedion, José Luis Sert, and Fernand Legér, “Nine Points
on Monumentality” (1943), in Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documen-
tary Anthology, ed. Joan Ockman with Edward Eigen (New York: Rizzoli,
1993).
97. From the “historical” (i.e., Western European) avant-garde see Naum
Gabo, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Daniel Garza Usabiaga makes a
case for Mexico-based antecedents to cinetismo: Goeritz, Rossell, Germán
R e s p o n s i v e E y e s : U r b a n L o g i s t i c s a n d K i n e t i c E n v i r o n m e n t s f o r t h e 1 9 6 8 M e x i c o C i t y Oly m p i c s     397
Cueto, and Siqueiros. Garza Usabiaga, ed., Cinetismo: ­M ovimiento y
­transformación en e arte de los sesenta y setenta (Mexico City: Museo de Arte
Moderno, 2012), 14–16.
98. Cinetismo: Esculturas electrónicas en situaciones ambientales (Mexico City:
Museo Universitario de Cinencias y Arte, 1968), 4. Kepes shared Goeritz’s
more forceful view that “the forces of nature that man has brought under
a measure of his control have again become alien; they now approach us
menacingly by avenues opened by science and technology” (Kepes, Arts of
the Environment, 1).
99. See Mathias Goeritz, “Advertencia,” Arquitectura/México 75 (1961),
172. Elena de Bértola, an early commentator on cinetismo in Latin America,
emphasized this not purely entertaining or diverting aspect; see De Bértola,
El arte cinético: El movimiento y la transformación; Análisis perceptivo y
­functional (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1973).
100. With the title, Cuevas was also referring to the Cold War’s Iron
­Curtain. The story was published in English in 1959; José Luis Cuevas,
“The Cactus Curtain: An Open Letter on Conformity in Mexican Art,”
Evergreen Review 2, no. 7 (1959), 111–20.
101. Raquel Tibol, “En la universidad,” Calli Internacional: Revista Analítica
de Arquitectura Contemporánea 35 (1968), 9. Days before the ephemeral
mural was begun, the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana organized a group show
to counter the Exposición Solar, the main exhibition produced by the
­Olympic Committee as part of the Cultural Olympiad, contesting its anti­
quated orientation toward painting and sculpture and its prize structure.
While none of the artwork specifically or formally pointed to recent
events—they had been produced for the most part before the movement
began—several artists hung their canvases facing the wall, choosing to dis­
play handwritten protest messages or popular slogans. See Pilar García,
“The Salón Independiente: A New Reading,” in La era de la discrepancia/The
Age of Discrepancies: Arte y cultura visual en México/Art and Cultura in ­Mexico,
1968–1997, ed. Olivier Debroise (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 2007), 49–57.
102. “El Arte Cinético Tiende a Romper Las Normas Tradicionales
­Impuestas por Las Minorías: Julio Le Parc,” El Día, 28 May 1968.
103. David Hickey, introduction to Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s,
ed. Joe Houston (New York: Merrell, 2007), 13. After seeing the Responsive
Eye exhibition, John Canaday wrote: “Optical art has a combination of
virtues new to modern art: it fascinates, even for different reasons, both
the aesthete and the layman.” Canaday, “Art That Pulses, Quivers and
Fascinates,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, 21 Feb. 1965, 59.
104. For a description, see Mexico City chronicler Carlos Monsiváis,
Días de guardar (Mexico City: Era, 1970), 78–90.
105. To point to a comparable case, Venezuela’s government and economic
elites were quick to endorse the work of various artists (Carlos Cruz-Diez,
Jesús Rafael Soto, and Alejandro Otero), which was perceived as harboring
no explicit political message. See Marta Traba, “Finale: Alegro con fuoco,”
in Alfredo Boulton and His Contemporaries: Critical Dialogues in Venezuelan
Art, 1912–1974, ed. Ariel Jiménez (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
2008), 278–87.
106. Canaday, “Designing the 1968 Olympics,” 67.
107. See, e.g., the classic Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design
(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983). The fifth edition, Meggs’
­History of Graphic Design (New York: Wiley, 2011), cowritten with Alston
W. Purvis, includes a handful of mentions.