The Case of El Pedregal's Television Program, 1953-1954

This paper presents an inedited segment of a nearly completed book dedicated to the architecture that emerged in the Gardens of El Pedregal of San Ángel in the years from 1947 to 1967. The Gardens of El Pedregal is a historic subdivision planned in 1945 and located in Mexico City. It shares El Pedregal’s land with the University where this international conference takes place. The book centers not in the better-known participation of Luis Barragán in the project but in how dozens of architects and hundreds of clients expanded, during the next decade-and-a-half, on the architectural concepts of the subdivision. The book documents five years of field and archival research in equal partnership with Mexican professor … (name withdrew). The paper focuses in a monographic subject: the series of television programs that the management of the Gardens of El Pedregal sponsored in the emerging Mexican television. Starting in January 1953, in order to publicize the subdivision, they paid for a weekly television program that lasted two full years. Our sources–previously untapped—emerge from our fortunate rediscovery of Héctor Cervera, the producer and writer of the television program. Cervera, after confirming the historian’s heartbreaking fact that live television broadcasts of the era were not recorded, unearthed from his archive the complete set of original scripts for all episodes of the program. These scripts are an invaluable material to document the dependency of modern architecture on publicity for operations that involve large number of people. This paper follows with small variations—the first chapter of the book.

Volume Editors
David Covo & Gabriel Mérigo Basurto

ISBN
0-935502-57-2