Letters to the Mayor: Mexico City

March 5th – April 4th, 2016

Spanish Cultural Center in Mexico City

 

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Storefront presents Letters to the Mayor: Mexico City as part of the global Letters to the Mayor project. Each iteration presents a collection of letters by more than 100 architects, addressing the most pressing issues facing their city. 

 

Letters to the Mayor: Mexico City was part of MEXTRÓPOLI, an international festival of architecture and the city. The festival inspires a creative, critical, and participatory approach between citizens through lectures, dialogues, workshops, city tours, pavilions, and open air activities that transform Mexico City into a pioneer of architecture and urbanism worldwide. MEXTRÓPOLI gathers more than 22,000 people over four days to design the city. Students, citizens, professionals, tourists, creatives, public figures, opinion leaders, and experts come together for this event to generate knowledge through architecture.

 

Letters to the Mayor: Mexico City invited the following architects to write to Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera:

 

Participants

Miquel Adrià, Carolyn Aguilar, Víctor Alcérreca, Ernesto Alva, Mariana Barrón, Sergio Beltrán, Tatiana Bilbao, Clara de Buen, Sol Camacho, Fernanda Canales, Raúl Cárdenas, Juan Carlos Cano, Gabriela Carrillo, Loreta Castro, Aura Cruz, Pablo Goldin Marcovich, Bernardo Gómez Pimienta, Teodoro González de León, Pedro Hernández, Alejandro Hernández Gálvez, Jimena Hogrebe, Wonne Ickx, Laura Janka, Pablo Kobayashi, Juan José Kochen, Erika Loana, Héctor López, Rozana Montiel, Zeller y Moye, Enrique Norten, Selene Patlán, Emmanuel Ramírez, Benjamín Romano, Patricio Ruiz, Pedro y Juana, Félix Sánchez, Javier Sánchez, Juan José Sánchez Aedo, Surella Segú, Luby Springall, Sara Topelson, Elena Tudela, Horacio Urbano, Yuri Zagorín, Carlos Zedillo

 

 

PROJECT TEAM

 

Local Curator

Andrea Griborio

 

Mayoral Desk / Architect’s Table Design

Pedro Hernández

 

Wallpaper Design

César Mendoza

 

 

ABOUT LETTERS TO THE MAYOR

 

Letters to the Mayor is an itinerant exhibition that displays real letters written by architects to their city mayors. Initiated by Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2014, the project has traveled to more than 15 cities across the globe, including Bogota, Mexico City, Athens, Panama City, Taipei, Mariupol, Madrid, Lisbon, and Buenos Aires, among others. See here for a list of iterations.  

 

Letters to the Mayor invites 100 architects in each city to write a letter to their mayor as a means of bringing innovative ideas and visions of the city closer to the decision-makers, and vice versa.

 

Throughout history, architects have engaged with this responsibility and the structures of economic, political, and cultural power in different ways and with varying degrees of success. With the rise of globalization and the homogenization of the contemporary city, the role of the architect in the political arena has often been relegated to answering questions that others have asked. 

 

Letters to the Mayor questions this dynamic, and invites local and global architects to deliver their thoughts directly to the desks of elected officials, and simultaneously into the public consciousness.

 

 

SUPPORT

 

Letters to the Mayor is part of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s initiative Architecture Conflicts, a project with the purpose of identifying pressing issues, ongoing conflicts, and design solutions in relation to the most important urban problems today. Architecture Conflicts is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

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