Hypnosis

For the Olympics, a powerful iconography was designed that was based on, among other elements, the “Mexico 68” logo, in which the circular shapes of the numbers overlapped with those of the Olympic rings. The lines of the logo’s letters and numbers were repeated indefinitely to create a strong sense of optical reverberation. When reproduced on any surface, this infinite repetition of lines produced a vibrant, dynamic image. The graphic language that was developed around this logo, and which gave a clear identity to the Mexico City Olympics, was similar to many other visual and graphic expressions of the 1960s – that is, it was ambiguous, dynamic, colorful and hypnotic, and evoked the urban drug culture. This visual language was used for all objects designed for the Olympic Games, from buttons and lighters to the streets of the capital, not to mention dresses, publications, posters and films, which served as a smokescreen for social divisions. These latter nevertheless became self-evident, as could be seen at the Milan Triennale, where the attractive design of the Mexican Pavilion contrasted with the student protests that surrounded the exhibition.

Recycling

Olympic Architecture Was Colonial and Pre-Hispanic 

Though attempting to demonstrate that Mexico was perfectly prepared to organize one of the most complex athletic competitions in the world, Olympic publications mostly featured examples of colonial and pre-Hispanic architecture. Despite the fact that premodern buildings such as Teotihuacan or Acolman are useless for the modern Olympic games, Mexico constantly used images of historic architecture in the publications aimed at the International Olympic Committee (IOC), as well as foreign audiences in general. It was understood that, from the nineteenth century on, Europeans had constructed an image of Latin America as being exotic, mystical, spiritual and mysterious. Ever since the first international exhibitions, less industrialized countries were forced to identify with their alleged otherness in order to be accepted into the select group of modern nations. The official ideology of Mexican nationalism also demanded that, to be considered legitimate, modern cultural expressions should be based on the formal language of the cultures of ancient Mesoamerica or colonial New Spain, no matter if this came naturally or was forced. Curiously, the architecture built for the Mexico City Olympics is among the least nationalist in the twentieth century, and in a clear contradiction, many pre-Hispanic temples in Cuicuilco were destroyed during the construction of the Olympic Village.

Olympic Architecture Recycled Modern Architecture

The images of the country’s most modern buildings were also recycled. Impressive photographs of skyscrapers, museums and car factories – also useless for the Olympics – were used in media aimed at the IOC and domestic and international audiences. Why did they constantly publish examples of contemporary architecture – of any kind – if what was needed was to prove that athletic facilities were being built for the Olympics? Photographs of the Nonoalco Tlatelolco Housing Complex, for example, were directly and indirectly used to give the impression that Mexico had either completed its Olympic Village, or had construction well underway. Even though Tlatelolco was publicized in domestic and foreign media as a building complex with no connection to the games, it was resignified by its appearance in Olympic publications and, as often happens in modern architecture, played a role for which it had not been designed. 

The Cartographic City

Maps of the country’s capital played a fundamental role in showing the alleged progress in organizing the games, building new structures and adapting existing ones and planning the city. This had the goal of showing that Mexico City was well-organized, well-connected, easily navigable and properly equipped for the Olympics. Instead of using social or scientific urban planning methods, however, they used strategies such as wayfinding, the construction of mega-highways and the placement of urban sculptures. The superficiality of these urban policies is even more evident when contrasted with the complexity and radicalism of the era’s urban thought, as exemplified by the Situationist, Aldo Rossi, Superstudio and Yona Friedman, whose ideas took the existence of chaos as a given and saw any attempt to create a totalizing urban order as futile. 

These maps also revealed a lack of decisiveness regarding the placement of Olympic facilities at a time when construction should have started, and even been finished. One example of this is that the site of the Olympic Village changed in every version of these maps; the final site of these enormous (and high-quality) residential buildings was on an ejido containing countless archaeological remains from Cuicuilco, which were destroyed in the construction process. 

The Myth of Color TV

The XIX Olympiad was the first to be broadcast in color. The Mexican Olympic Committee naturally did not miss the opportunity to celebrate this as one of its greatest achievements. Nevertheless, it is worth asking: how many Mexican families had a black-and-white television set in 1968, never mind a color set? Today we can ask this very question to those who remember the Mexico City Olympics. Even though domestic television broadcasting was expanding at the end of the 1960s, and Mexico was a pioneer in developing color television technology, the official Olympics news service itself reported that there were only 41 television sets for every thousand people, very few of them in color. Many Olympic structures were designed to be seen best on television, rather than from the stands, which did not meet demand, particularly during the finals.

Mexico Can Do It

On October 18, 1963, Mexico City formally announced its candidacy for the XIX Olympiad in the city of Baden Baden. This bid was based on the book Mexico requests…, designed and probably written by the architect Lorenzo Carrasco. It confidently argued that Mexico had all the buildings needed for the Olympics and that, if needed, more would be built in due time. Nevertheless, in February 1964, less than one year later, Carrasco wrote an article titled “Have We Built Athletic Architecture?” (Calli 13), in which he contradicted the argument of the book he had edited, seriously questioning whether Mexico had the athletic infrastructure needed for the world’s most complex sporting competition. 

The book appealed to traditional narratives of Mexican nationalism: heroic, linear and racist. This nationalism – quite antiquated in the postwar geopolitical context – allowed the country to achieve something unprecedented: hosting the first Olympics in Latin America. A pacifist discourse was added to this narrative, which was extremely well-designed for consumption abroad in the complicated context of the Cold War, but which was unbelievable and even insulting to Mexicans. 

A Late Start

In 1966 and throughout most of 1967, the international press criticized Mexico’s delays in organizing the Olympic Games, including the construction of the necessary facilities. The domestic press, loyal to the Díaz Ordaz administration, said that everything was going according to the official schedule – which was not public – even though construction had not yet begun. Only a few weeks before the opening ceremony, with athletes and journalists already arriving in the city, print media reported that many Olympic facilities were still finishing up construction. In the end, some details were left unfinished, such as the painting of the pavement around the Palacio de los Deportes – only the emblematic strips of colors that surrounded the Olympic Stadium on the UNAM campus and the Estadio Azteca were painted. 

Manipulation

The combination of extraordinary photography, a good text and high-quality editorial design makes us accept – almost unquestioningly – the messages or ideas thus imparted, but this does not mean that the ideas and images that we receive through print media are truthful or based on reality. For example, the pages of the publication shown here are designed to make the reader assume that the modifications to the stadium it describes can be seen in the accompanying photographs. Nevertheless, if the photos are examined closely, it is clear that none of these modifications had even been initiated. As time went by and no progress was made on the preparations for the XIX Olympiad, the world began to wonder if Mexico would be ready in time. 

What would a foreign reader in 1963 imagine when seeing an impressive photograph of the Nonoalco Tlatelolco Housing Complex with the words “Olympic Village” as the header? Yet the complex’s architect, Mario Pani, was excluded from the design of the Olympic Village and the rest of the Olympic infrastructure, as were many other important Mexican architects of the time. 

Models

Photographs of models of the projects to be built were published to accompany texts that stated that work had begun. The image of a model has never meant that construction is underway, but given the delay in building Olympic facilities, they were used to make the public believe that ground had been broken at Palacio de los Deportes, the Olympic Pool and the Sala de Armas, and even to deceive distracted readers, who could easily confuse a model with a finished building. 

Competitions

Historically, architectural competitions in Mexico have always been surrounded by controversy. The case of the only two buildings for the XIX Olympiad that were assigned through competitions was no exception. Most of the country’s architectural community – which included many domestically and internationally renowned Mexican designers – were excluded from designing the world’s most important athletic facilities in 1968, whether because they did not belong to the very select group of those invited to participate in the competitions, because they were not known to the organizers or, perhaps, it was not believed they could meet the tight deadline for the games.   

An article in the magazine Arquitectos de México (No. 27, February 1967) contrasted the open, transparent way in which architects were invited to submit proposals for the 1972 Munich Olympics with the closed, unclear process for the design and construction of buildings for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. 

Rebellion

The architecture and print media relating to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics were created in the midst of an extraordinarily conflictive period in the history of Western culture. Specialized architectural media and the Mexican government tried at all costs to ignore, cover up and repress all manifestations of these conflicts. Nevertheless, domestic and international discontent with life under capitalism, the tensions of the Cold War, the Cuban Revolution and the struggles of women, African-Americans and homosexuals – to name just a few – filtered through the cracks of even the most solidly conservative publications.

No matter how hard we try to isolate it from its social and cultural context, architecture arises from and speaks to the complex and contradictory conditions of its historic moment, albeit often in conflicting fashions. These conditions shook the foundations of traditional ways of understanding the discipline all over the world. Though there are always interpretations of architecture that only analyze form, space and the beauty of a building and its representations, the evidence of tension, imbalance or violence in the societies that produce architectonic culture cannot be erased or denied. 

Mexico is Square

It is necessary to analyze the publications printed for the Olympics from a visual, compositional and aesthetic perspective in order to contribute to their critique. We must take into account not only their composition, but also their basic elements, the technology of the time and the publishing models that Beatrice Trueblood – who was up-to-date on the latest trends in New York – had in mind. Trueblood was credited for her editing and composition work.

We have analyzed the basic concepts. Format: always square, with the Olympic posters being 22.5 cm2, Olympic bulletins being 29 cm2, the collection of white books 28.7 cm2, etc. Weight: 120 g matte coated paper predominated for interior pages. Gridlines: the 2-3-4-6 system was used, as measured from the margins. Font: News Gothic, a condensed sans-serif (Morris F. Benton, 1908). Printing: phototypesetting and rotary presses were used, in four colors. Finishes: sewn and bound with hot melt adhesive, in paperback and hardcover editions, such as with the collection of white books, which were considered to be expensive and luxurious.

[For this exhibition we used the typography Oswald (Vernon Adams, Google Fonts, 2011) which could be considered a current descendant of News Gothic.]

The impressive print run of over 10 million copies – planned and designed at the offices of the Olympic Committee and printed by Galas de México in record time – is without equal in Mexican history.

Cinema