Through conversations with those who have lived and worked in the projects of interest, historians who have studied them, activists who have fought for their preservation, and iconoclasts who have wished them dismantled, En-Medio drops into architectural narratives of the city, long underway, to ask what possible futures lie ahead.^[1]

The third issue presents Museo Experimental El Eco, a cultural space designed in 1952 by the German-born immigrant Mathias Goeritz. Supported by Goeritz’s “Manifesto of Emotional Architecture,” El Eco was conceptualized as an occupiable sculpture that sought to provoke an emotional response from inhabitants. The space was funded and initially conceived of by businessman Daniel Mont, who hired Goeritz for the project and gave him complete artistic freedom. In October 1953, less than a month after opening, El Eco was forced to close its doors due to the sudden death of Mont. The event had a lasting and profound impact on the space, precipitating an era of physical and programmatic changes. Throughout the next four decades El Eco accommodated the diverse uses of a restaurant and bar, university theater, experimental art and theater space, and cultural center. In 1990—the same year as Goeritz’s death—El Eco was shuttered and abandoned. It was not until 2004 that the building saw a new occupant, when it was purchased by UNAM with the intention to reopen El Eco under the original precepts with which it was designed five decades earlier. Still in operation today, the institution approaches the subject of preservation through the continuation of Goeritz’s social and artistic mission, rather than by a fixed, historical interpretation of the building itself.

The following conversation was held in May 2017 with David Miranda, visual artist and curator at Museo Experimental El Eco. We met to discuss the many physical and programmatic transformations the building has experienced, the evolution of the surrounding neighborhood, and how this history informs the way in which the museum operates today.

Museo Experimental El Eco, conversation with David Miranda

David Miranda
I arrived to El Eco for a very particular reason. In September 2005, El Eco reopened its doors with a blockbuster exhibition by Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, and Carlos Amorales. The real challenge came afterwards, because there was no museum per se. There was no program or administrative infrastructure.

A month after the reopening Guillermo Santamarina, then director of El Eco, called me to say: “Hey, you haven’t come yet!”^[2] Apart from inviting me to visit the exhibition, he took the chance to ask whether I’d be interested in collaborating with him on the museum. I answered that I was closing a few projects and wasn’t sure, to which he replied, “No, I will see you tomorrow” and hung up the phone.

When I arrived to El Eco the next day, I entered the office and found an empty cubicle with only one chair. Guillermo was sitting there with a telephone on his lap. He restated his invitation to work with him. I believe he invited me to participate, and not a conventional curator, because by then I had developed several projects on art education, training people and creating mediation projects. He said: “What do you think? This is what there is. We can do whatever we want, decide what it is and what it is not. It’s a ton of work, and you will live here, but this is something new and it depends on us for it to serve any purpose. Decide now whether you’re in or out.” And so it was! Two days later I was working at El Eco. Just like that, without furniture. So it goes.

Departamento del Distrito
How did you approach the contemporary identity of the building?

DM
Before the reopening of El Eco there were many discussions about its future. Back then, Felipe Leal coordinated Special Projects at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a unit that was commissioned to restore the building.^[3] During this limbo period El Eco’s destiny was decided. The first option was to convert the site into a museum dedicated to the professional and personal story of Mathias Goeritz. The other option was simply to continue with the building’s original program. Fortunately, UNAM had the sensibility to choose the latter. There were even people who wanted the building to become an architecture museum, which would have been a mistake.

Upon my arrival we began with the key facts that composed the building’s history. Afterwards, the place became a sort of black hole. It began attracting different people and situations: visitors that had known it as CLETA; visitors that had known it as the Foro Isabelino; students of Goeritz… It was then that, without having planned it, I became the recipient of all this information. Conversation after conversation filled the bag. At that moment, the idea to generate a museum as a space not for conservation but for social encounters started to take shape.
I think that important works transcend the biography of their authors, and in the specific case of El Eco that happened. Guillermo understood that this is a place that can only be completed through its activation. In other words, El Eco cannot be a site specific museum or one of static memory; it has to engage with a continual process of reconfiguration. Only by doing so does Goeritz’s “inhabitable sculpture” make sense.

DdD
Of course, that can only happen by functioning as a platform for social interaction. How complex was it to initiate the curation of a space that, although having a clear mission defined by Mont and Goeritz, had not operated long enough to generate an identity of its own?

DM
It was very complex. We had to make various interpretations. To put the life of Goeritz in context, he was someone derived from the Cold War, a former employee of the German National Cultural Service. He did his thesis on Frederick Borninski—quite an academic painter—and on top of everything he wasn’t trained as an artist but as an art historian. It was only during his transit through Europe that he decided to become an artist. Furthermore, Goeritz was a man for whom separating himself from Germany during the Second World War was fundamental. Not only in political terms but also aesthetic. Arriving to Mexico he could detach himself from all of that.

With this legacy in mind, a fundamental part of the challenge focused on the redefinition of today’s artistic experimentation, which isn’t necessarily technological, counter-cultural, or modernist, but one suited to accumulation—not accumulation of knowledge but of experiences. In other words, El Eco behaves as a platform for “happenings” and in that way we experiment. Like this, little by little, we created programs and identified a procedure. First, in order to generate spaces for confrontation and dialogue as a university institution. And, second, in order to say, yes, we are a museum even though we have no collection. What we preserve aren’t objects but the very essence of the site and its envelope, and what we are interested in is not exhibiting artistic works but promoting independent creative processes.

DdD
Until what year was Guillermo Santamarina the director of El Eco?

DM
Until the end of 2008, which is when he went to MUAC.^[4] After him came Tobias Ostrander, who came with a completely different vision. He came to create an institution. With Tobias we established specific lines of research based on various texts written by Goeritz. The first year we started working with the topic of “temporal abstraction.” The second year the curatorial axis shifted to “Emotional Architecture.”^[5] In addition, Tobias created the El Eco pavilion competition, known as Pabellón Eco, which was inspired by similar projects led by MoMA PS1 and the Serpentine Gallery. We believed creating a temporary pavilion was an interesting means to engage with El Eco, supporting its identity as an unfinished monument to be activated, even transgressed.

DdD
Was it around this time that the annex to El Eco was built?

DM
Yes, that took place in 2007 before Guillermo’s departure. The space of El Eco was insufficient for the needs of a contemporary museum. There was no storage space or workshop, the office space was very minimal, and there was no auditorium. Thus, an architectural competition was organized for the annex, generating a discussion around how the addition should be designed and even the structure of the competition itself.^[6] It was important that the annex not be too aggressive. In the end, the one who really occupied and activated the new space was Tobias.

It’s around this time that all of the speculation began on what an experimental museum should be today. The terms “museum” and “experimentation” are in total contradiction to one another, and I was confronted with a real problem by their pairing. Through establishing a historical narrative of the museum in this country, I found that El Eco might represent the missing link between post-revolutionary Mexico and our contemporary art scene. It was then that I understood many things that aren’t exclusively related to the museum’s architecture, but extend to its use and function.

DdD
Speaking of the link between architectural form and program, how did Goeritz understand the relationship between art and architecture?

DM
Goeritz thought that art should be a public service. For this reason he was more attracted to the life that took place outside of traditional exhibition spaces, rather than inside them. He was interested in the idea of public art, not understood in terms of nationalistic propaganda that was popular in Mexico at the time, but as a larger project that people could inhabit.

That is why he didn’t participate in discussions with his contemporaries on exhibition and interior museum design. His most important works were realized through public projects such as the Ruta de la Amistad, the Espacio Escultórico, and the Yellow Wall. He was looking elsewhere, searching for devices that would transcend his time. This is also why he was so attracted to the way cathedral builders worked during the 15th and 16th centuries. He was interested in the notion that architects of that time period were capable of coordinating people from different disciplines. In turn, he considered El Eco to be the result of the will of many people, making a comparison to the production models of great works during the Renaissance. What he extracted was a mode of operation; he thought of individualism as one of the great cancers of the postwar world.   

DdD
Thinking of the diverse programs that El Eco has housed over its history, I’m curious to know if any part of this lineage—the original El Eco space, the restaurant and bar, the University Center for Theatre—have had an influence on the way in which the museum operates today.

DM
All of it. For example, we have a program inspired by the Center for Free Theatrical and Artistic Experimentation (CLETA), housed in El Eco from 1973-82, called Barra Eco. During this event the museum is transformed into a bar for one night and we commission an artist to create an intervention. We organize two of these events each year. We also have the pavilion competition, in which we establish a dialogue with architects. Everything we do responds to the history of the museum. The fact that the same architectural device enables the emergence of many different uses proves that the project was well thought out.

DdD
In relation to the history of the building, can you also speak to the evolution of the surrounding neighborhood of San Rafael?

DM
In urban terms, one situation that has recently impacted the neighborhood was the nearby construction of the new Senate building. The local impact was very aggressive. It brought an enormous stream of people into the area, raising the price of land and apartment rents, while the number of office spaces multiplied. An area that was once primarily residential was transformed into a workspace for bureaucrats and clerks. Nowadays, the majority of inhabitants have little attachment to the neighborhood. So, for example, if someone wants to change the local park, or build a commercial development, there will be very few who oppose it. San Rafael has turned into a transit neighborhood.

DdD
In light of these inevitable changes, have you allowed for the museum’s identity to evolve?

DM
To begin, one has to assume that this is de facto an incomplete work. In addition, one has to understand, like in many other situations, that on the road there will be moments of serendipity. For example, Henry Moore’s mural was one those moments. It was not originally intended for the space. The original mural, “El Grito,” was going to be painted by the artist Rufino Tamayo and was fortunately never realized. I say fortunately because if we had a mural by Tamayo here today it would be strictly protected—we could not touch it. None of the changes in the use of El Eco would have occurred, and the building would likely never have been abandoned.

The story goes that Tamayo was going to charge more than the entire cost of the building for the mural, and thus the commission was canceled. In the following months, Henry Moore visited Mexico and made sketches of the Judas figures Diego Rivera had in his studio. Goeritz saw the sketches and decided to make them the subject of the El Eco mural. He liked that the sketches were made in the house of Diego Rivera—the most important Mexican muralist—and that their content was not driven by nationalist propaganda like the majority of murals at that time. He also thought—very intelligently—this would be to Tamayo like a slap in the face with a white glove.

DdD
Goeritz was clearly a person with an ironic sense of humor…

DM
Very ironic. In some occasion David Serur, a friend of Goeritz, told me his work was full of humor. Besides, Goeritz understood that Mexico was an extremely conservative country and that a sense of humor could be provocative; he played with that.

DdD
It’s interesting to think of El Eco as a platform in which you set the stage and the actors, and by doing so allow for unforeseen events to occur. It’s something like an open system, a concept quite revolutionary for the time when the museum was conceived. It seems Goeritz’s training as an art historian and his later self-taught work as an artist allowed him to have a sensibility for this type of condition.

DM
I agree. When we speak of emotional architecture we are not only referring to the building. You know very well, architecture is not only the walls but is also what happens inside. That is what we as an institution are interested in preserving and replicating as a model. This helps us link what we do now to the history that precedes us—not only from a historical perspective, but also from a sensitive one.

Goeritz understood art as a means to build other things. Personally, that has stayed with me. What I find most important about his legacy is a directive to detach art from disciplinary issues and restate that it also has a social function. The same should happen in architecture, in all aspects.