'Shaping Transformation' Charts the Multigenerational Impact of Mexican Firm Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos

In 2010, while on a research trip in Mexico City, the architectural historian Barry Bergdoll, at the time the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, came across a building that struck him, he says, with the force of “a traffic accident.” Composed of staggered concrete slabs, the tower, Bergdoll says, “looked like a SuperDutch from 1998, but it was Mexico in 1975.” Designed by Juan Sordo Madaleno, that tower made its way into Bergdoll’s 2015 MoMA exhibition Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980, the thesis of which, Bergdoll told me, was “to show how many innovations and ideas originate in Latin America.” More recently, it led to Bergdoll’s work on the current exhibition at Mexico City’s Palacio Iturbide, which runs until July 9 and celebrates the 80 prolific years since Sordo Madaleno founded his eponymous firm.

Arranged around the 18th-century palace’s grand central courtyard, the exhibition, called Shaping Transformation (rendered in Spanish as Transformación Urbana, or Urban Transformation) follows the work of Sordo Madaleno’s three generations of architects with an emphasis on the radical changes that have made and remade Mexico City’s landscape over the last century. By far the most compelling elements of the exhibition focus on the firm’s founder, an under-sung participant in Mexico’s modern movement and among the country’s most constant proponents of the International Style.