The New York Times-20080127-A Campus Serves As a Needed Oasis In a Crowded City

Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080127

A Campus Serves As a Needed Oasis In a Crowded City

Full Text (1252  words)

ALTHOUGH the last thing students or parents on vacation want to think about is school, indulging in higher-education tourism in Mexico City can be a refreshingly unacademic experience. Especially when the university you are talking about is a city unto itself.

Ciudad Universitaria is the main campus of the Universidad Nacional Autonomo de Mexico, the largest university in Latin America, responsible for tuning the minds of those who have gone out to shape the country (three Mexican Nobel laureates -- Alfonso Garcia Robles in 1982 for peace, Octavio Paz in 1990 for literature and Mario Molina in 1995 for chemistry -- are graduates). Since 2005, Universidad Autonomo has been ranked as the best university in Latin America, Spain and Portugal.

Although high-powered academics don't add up to much for tourists thirsting for sights, the campus reveals a surprising, often overlooked dimension of Mexico City. A green oasis within a gray city, the campus houses an even greener botanical garden, a patchwork of untouched, exuberant wilderness representing various regions of the country. The sprawling sculpture garden combines naturally occurring volcanic lava beds with gaudy, oversized metal contortions from Mexico's best-known sculptors. A new art museum, scheduled to open this year, will have the largest exhibition space of contemporary art within the city. And, as the recent Unesco designation as a World Heritage Site emphasized, the campus has one of the most impressive clusters of Modernist architecture in Latin America.

The campus, more than 1,500 acres in the southern part of Mexico City, is as large as Monaco, and thus it's no surprise that it has its own transportation system, police force and government. Unlike other cities, especially the one that surrounds it, this city is lacking in traffic, crime, overpopulation and overdevelopment.

Getting there is now a lot easier, because the new Metro Bus that runs the length of Avenida Insurgentes connects it to much of Mexico City. Inside the campus, there are free shuttle buses that service the winding streets on weekdays. It's possible to tour the campus on foot because the places of interest are clustered in the areas around the Central Library and the nearby cultural complex.

The original version of the university, the Universidad Real y Pontificia de Mexico, was established in 1551 in the historic center of Mexico City. University City, which began functioning in 1954, was designed to bring together the scattered academic departments. To do this, the city government bought up a huge parcel of undeveloped land near the affluent colonial towns of San Angel and Coyoacan, which had only been incorporated into the urban sprawl.

Most cities grow in stages, physically incorporating the passage of time within its architecture. The core of Ciudad Universitaria, however, was brought into this world in just a few years in the early 1950s, and thus houses a notable concentration of modern functionalist architecture, which is one of the main reasons why Unesco declared it a World Heritage Site in mid-2007. The campus is one of only a few modern sites (along with the Sydney Opera House) that appear on Unesco's list of 851 extraordinary cultural sites.

Mexico City may inspire images of pre-Hispanic pyramids or colonial cathedrals, but the constructions on the campus give a much more nuanced appreciation of national identity. While most of the original buildings are monuments to Modernist architecture, the Mexican artists who worked alongside the architects and engineers managed to incorporate premodern or even antimodern tendencies within the campus structures. Juan O'Gorman, a Mexican painter and architect who built a house and studio for his friends Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, was responsible for the design of the Central Library as well as the mural, replete with images of pre-Hispanic rituals and atomic science, that wraps around the building.

Jutting out from one wall of the main administration building in front of the library is David Alfaro Siqueiros's 3D mural glorifying social struggle. In keeping with the spirit of the mural, the university has always been in the forefront of political activity, with student strikes in 1968 (ending in a student massacre), 1987 and 1999, the last two in response to the administration's threat of charging tuition.

Dozens of new projects have continued to update the campus. The 1970s cultural complex succumbs to the ungainly concrete and glass tendencies of the times, although its forums still offer world-class culture to students and visitors. The Sala Nezahuacoytl, reputed to have the best acoustics in Latin America, often offers free concerts of the University Philharmonic Orchestra, and avant-garde theater, dance and film are featured in the other theaters within the complex.

Now under construction, the University Museum of Contemporary Art designed by Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon (one of the students involved in the original campus plan) will most likely open this summer. The university's Museum of Arts and Sciences, near the Central Library, has been serving as a contemporary art space for years, so the new museum isn't necessarily filling a cultural gap, and its white concrete and green-tinted-glass bunkerlike structure makes little effort to integrate itself into the campus aesthetic. Nevertheless, it will house Mexico's largest collection of art created after 1952.

THE university is much more than just the sum of its buildings, though, and it is in fact the campus's natural wonders that best integrate it with the regional landscape. In 400 A.D., the eruption of the Xitle volcano carpeted the southern part of the valley with volcanic rock and created a lunar landscape that remained mostly uninhabited until the university was established there.

As a monument to the volcanic mountains that surround the city, dozens of gigantic cement mini-pyramids ring a pit of solidified lava to create a rock garden in which people can hike or climb the walls. On a clear day you can see the snow-capped volcanic mountains in the distance from the vantage point atop the mini-pyramids. On a normal (that is to say, polluted) day it's hard to see anything beyond the dozen or so gaudy metal sculptures (built in the 1980s by some of Mexico's most famous, though not necessarily best artists, Manuel Felguerez, Matias Goertiz and Sebastian among them) placed along the pathways and within a small valley of overgrown underbrush across the street. Snaking its way around the sculptures is a volanic rock wall in the form of a pre-Hispanic serpent that, if you are not fazed by heights, provides an exciting view of the sculptures and the nearby cultural complex.

Volcanic ash is a naturally rich fertilizer, and the campus is overgrown with plants, flowers and trees that have earned the campus its status as an environmental reserve and one of the lungs of Mexico City. Much of the campus is overrun by a surprisingly rough-and-tumble flora that acts as a natural barrier, keeping weekly visitors from destroying what nature has taken so long to create.

The university's botanical garden offers a kinder, gentler concentration of green. Within the garden, cactuses reach monumental heights, a tropical jungle stews inside a hothouse, and a medicinal herb garden is designed to function like a natural apothecary.

Wandering around the garden and the rest of the architectural and natural wonders of the Ciudad Universitaria campus is a crash course in appreciating what's best about Mexico City.

For information on Ciudad Universitaria, visit www.unam.mx/EN/.

[Illustration]PHOTO: The mural-covered Central Library at the main campus of the Universidad Nacional Autonomo de Mexico. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JANET JARMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)MAP Map details area around Ciudad Universitaria in Mexico.