Book Launch “ATLAS”, by Alberto Kalach

Interludes 08

Book Launch “ATLAS of projects for Mexico City”
Alberto Kalach and Javier Toscano
January 30, 2013

 

Architect Alberto Kalach and philosopher Javier Toscano talked about urbanism in Mexico City and the power of tools like Google Earth to visualize and design this city. During the lecture the book “ATLAS of projects for Mexico City”, made by Kalach in 2012, was discussed.

Kallach said: “Nobody really gets to know Mexico City. There are as many Mexico Cities as there are inhabitants. Everyone lives his city differently, according to their activities, their routes and their habits. Over the course of time, through millions of partial decisions, some less and some more fortunate, the city has been transformed, giving it its actual ‘informal form’, a shape hard to define as real form, but rather as a system, an organism, as the exoskeleton of the urban man that eats away the territory. An insensitive crust that destroys lakes, fields and woods; that dries out, turns into deserts and kills. Stopping the growth of Mexico City seems impossible. Could we direct it?

This ‘ATLAS of projects for Mexico City’ sets from a dominant physical reality and aims, using imagination and knowledge as a tool, towards a new conformation of a possible city: more beautiful, efficient, and sustainable. The document gathers thirty seven projects in a conceptual level of diverse scales and topics, seeking not only to arouse interest and knowledge to the urban problematic of Mexico City but also to point out specific solutions.”