Modernist Ruins: The Case Study of Tlatelolco

Abstract

Some years ago Rem Koolhaas, the enfant terrible of architecture, proposed a hair-raising project: to take an entire district of Paris, the industrial area behind the Grand Arche de la Défense that had become an eyesore and a postmodern ruin of sorts, and demolish every building that was more than 25 years old. The process was to be repeated every five years, until the entire site had been—in Koolhaas’s words—“laundered,” “liberated,” and made available to an urban planner willing to conceive of new uses for the thousands of meters of empty space (1090–1096).