On a boulder-strewn lava plain outside Mexico City, 10,000 workmen, artists and engineers labored last week to finish Mexico's biggest single construction job since the building of the Halls of Montezuma (circa 1500). For the 401-year-old University of Mexico, North America's oldest university,* they were creating a handsome, ultramodern University City, spectacularly expressive of the new, post-revolutionary Mexico. Scheduled for occupancy early next year, the dazzling, $50 million University City is the most up-to-date college campus anywhere.
For generations, the University of Mexico had been a typical European-style collection of colleges scattered among downtown colonial monuments: the law school occupied a former convent, the medical faculty the Spanish Inquisition's old headquarters, the art school a onetime leper hospital. In 1948, the university's most powerful alumnus, President Miguel Alemán (Law, '28), decided that the 28,000 students needed a brand-new home—a U.S.-style campus complete with dormitories and a football stadium. A group of faculty and student architects submitted the winning design. Finally, in 1950, Alemán named Architect Carlos Lazo, 38, to take overall charge of the work.
Next Year's Car. Under Lazo's driving direction, a team of 156 architects and the country's best painters, sculptors and designers pitched in. Mexico's famed muralists for once muted their revolutionary messages and joined happily in experiments with giant outdoor mosaics.
The result is as modern as next year's car and as variegated as a Mexican market scene. Near the entrance looms an impressionistic statue of ex-President Alemán which bore such an odd resemblance to Joseph Stalin (see cut) that the sculptor had to do some retouching. Within the grounds a shell-roofed cosmic-ray laboratory shows the functional influence; translucent marble towers follow the "international" style of French architect Le Corbusier; glass-studded classroom cupolas renew the familiar form of the Spanish colonial. But all bear—in color, in texture, in decoration or design—the authentic Aztec mark of Mexico.
The handsome, new 110,000-seat stadium was literally built like Mexico's pyramids. To have built it wholly of concrete would have created a national cement shortage. Lazo got the idea of scooping back the volcanic rubble on the site into two great mounds, and laying a concrete oval shell on the cavity between. The job, carried out in 15 months, cost about one-fourth that of a concrete stadium. And because most of the oval's seats are located on the two tall slopes, most of the spectators can watch the university's football team from reasonably near the 50-yd. line. On the stadium's sloping outside walls, Diego Rivera is now executing a three-dimensional frieze of acid-painted stones. This "sculpture painting" depicts the history of Mexican sport from Mayan handball to gringo baseball.