Moon-Scar City: El Centro Histórico de la Ciudad de México, edited by professor in the practice Nathan Friedman and designed by Huber/Sterzinger, examines the future of Mexico City’s historic center through adaptation and speculative approaches to preservation.
The publication brings together research and design proposals that consider how architects might work within a complex urban fabric shaped by centuries of demographic, political, regulatory, and environmental change. Its focus is an entire Mexico City urban parcel at the western seam of the historic center’s Zones A and B, where approximately half of the existing structures are catalogued by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), revealing the complex dynamics of cultural patrimony and urban transformation. Through a series of preservation tactics and proposals for collective housing, Moon-Scar City explores alternative approaches to working with existing structures and material traces. The resulting projects reconsider established preservation protocols while proposing new value systems, modes of representation, material assemblies, building technologies, and forms of architectural space-making.
Moon-Scar City: El Centro Histórico de la Ciudad de México, is the first volume of the Architecture at Rice Pamphlets series, which shares previously unpublished pedagogical and disciplinary positions, and initial research probes from the Rice School of Architecture.