ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the breakdown of the campus of the National School of Agriculture at Chapingo, Mexico, designed by William C. Brubaker of Perkins + Will, in partnership with Augusto H. Álvarez and Enrique Carral Icaza of Mexico City, between 1963 and 1968. Caught between the interests of Mexico’s national agronomists, who held to the land restitution aims of the Mexican Revolution, those who saw those interests best served through the alignment of Mexico’s First Nations with the goals of the Comintern, and the international development aims of the Rockefeller’s Green Revolution scientists, Brubaker, Álvarez, and Carral attempted to design scientifically neutral answers to intrinsically political agricultural development questions. Orienting Plan Chapingo toward neither the Mexican Revolution, the Red Revolution, nor the Green Revolution, the architects proposed a heliotropic approach, grounding the campus plan in the revolution of the earth around the sun. When this solution failed to unite Chapingo’s agricultural factions, less than 20 miles away the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) set the stage for Rockefeller and Ford-funded agricultural schools and institutes throughout the Global South, as the divided campuses of the first site of the Green Revolution were replicated in facilities around the globe.
