A telephone speaker emerges from the 1985 earthquake’s ruins, scattered and half-hidden as they are in several spots of ancient Lake Texcoco. The rubble forms heaps of light-colored construction materials, which were formerly used by families dwelling in middle class houses until the day of the earthquake. The construction materials of those houses, turned into rubble by the strength of the quake, are increasingly harder to find in the homogeneous and tiny constructions of contemporary apartments, erected as a replacement of those crumbled homes. In the new apartments, the “walls” are built as voids lined with thin sheetrock planks, made of plaster and compressed sawdust, protected by vinyl resembling the color and the grain of pine wood. The reinforcements are made of anodized tin. On the other hand, the walls of sturdy cement, stone blocks, hand-painted ceramic tiles, the shattered granite and marble scattered in different sites in the lakebed, are all part of the past. Gone is the architecture of long-lasting, dense, heavy, detailed materials, covered with delicate ornaments. [...]
Telephone
in ENCYCLOPEDIA