Mario Pani's Hospitality

Architect Mario Pani was unhurried in embracing the work of his Latin American colleagues in the journal he founded and edited, Arquitectura, which would become the longest running (1938–1978) and, arguably, the most influential architecture journal in Mexico. ¹ That, as Latin Americans, they were colleagues at all was still crystallizing for Pani—starting in the late 1930s—as was the practice of an expansive form of architecture. This expansion was both territorial, looking at not just buildings but entire cities and beyond, and jurisdictional, claiming professional domains of technical and social expertise. Mexico’s modernist architects continued to grapple with the notion of a national school of architecture while at the same time reproductions of their work traveled through increasingly permeable—though never wide open—borders. Pani’s treatment of Latin American modern architecture in Arquitectura was a speculative enterprise, depending on a rotating network of correspondents as well as secondhand reports and reproductions rather than established bureaus and beats. The journal played a major role in eventually consolidating a modern Mexican architecture in connection and contrast to Latin American examples; or just as often, with no affinity at all. Pani’s uneven approach does not appear extraordinary when held up to the wavering light of Latin Americanism. Historically, interest in hemispheric solidarity has rarely been disinterested. Arquitectura did not fulfill a Bolivarian fantasy. That is not to say, however, that there was not much to gain and lose in how Latin America—and Mexico—were defined in its pages.