The image and meanings of Mexican Olympic architecture were to a great extent designed for media, long before the actual buildings were finished and could be experienced in October 1968. Half a century later, most Mexicans still perceive Olympic buildings—and the transformed city around them—through the veil of the image designed in 1968 by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and his team. This image—and the ideas about the city, architecture, and society which supported them—was most clearly expressed and explained in the numerous books and magazines printed for the Olympics. This exhibition we seeks to contribute to the understanding of the development of the mediated culture in which we live today, and the changes in the ways we experience, use and are subject to architecture.

Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez is an architecture professor and editor specialized in Mexico’s modern architecture. He studied architecture in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the MA in art, architecture and city planning hstory in the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya and, in the same university, is PhD candidate in history of architecture. He was head of the Publishing Department of UNAM’s School of Architecture from 2012 to 2107, a period in which the school’s books and journals received recognitions from several national and international institutions, like the Philip Johnson Award from the Society of Architectural Historians, awards and mentions from the Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism Biennale, the Quito Biennale and Mexico’s City Architecture Biennale, among others. He is coeditor, with Enrique X. de Anda, of Cultura arquitectónica de la modernidad mexicana (UNAM, 2007) and, with Cristina López Uribe, of Living CU/60 Years (UNAM, 2014). He has been advisor of architecture exhibitions at Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes. He teaches history of architecture at UNAM.

Cristina López Uribe is an architectural historian who specializes in 20th-century Mexican architecture. She graduated as an architect from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 2001 and holds an MA in art, architecture, and city planning history from the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, where she is currently a PhD candidate in the theory and history of architecture. She teaches history of architecture at UNAM, and is the editor-in-chief of Bitácora Arquitectura journal. She is coeditor, with Salvador Lizárraga, of Living CU /60 Years (UNAM, 2014) and author of an essay in Wendy Kaplan, Design in California and Mexico, 1915-1985: Found in Translation (LACMA, 2017), among other publications. She assisted MoMA curators for the Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980 exhibition and worked as advisor for Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 exhibition at LACMA.

Zenia Lozano Medécigo is a Mexican architect who graduated with honorable mention from the UNAM. She has also studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Saint Étienne, in France, and has a master’s degree in architectural lighting design at UNAM. Since 2012, she has worked as an architect on several projects and years later started to focus her energy towards creative studies and practice of lighting design. She is currently working as editor at UNAM’s School of Architecture, where she has contributed to the following publications: Historias que brotan de las rocas (2016), Naturaleza en el habitar (2017), Pláticas bajo tierra (2018).

William Brinkman-Clark is a professor of theory and philosophy of architecture at UNAM. He received his BA in architecture and his MA in theory of history from Universidad Iberoamericana and received a PhD in architecture from UNAM. His current research is focused on the ways the relations between aesthetics and politics are materialized in architecture and urbanism, and the epistemology of architectural judgment in Kant, Adorno, and Rancière. He is also a member of “Desterritorializaciones del poder: cuerpo diáspora y exclusión” a research project that focuses on the aesthetic and political implication of contemporary diasporas.

Erandi Casanueva Gachuz is a graphic designer from the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City, and did postgraduate studies in the Fines Arts National Institute and the Communications and Culture Research Institute, both in Mexico. She has been chief editor in several public and private institutions. Her books and magazines have received several awards, like the 2016 CANIEM Price, the IX Bienal Iberoamericana de Arquitectura y Urbanismo 2014 and the III Bienal de arquitectura de la Ciudad de México. She currently works at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México as the head editor of the Publishing Department of the School of Architecture.

Founded in 1910, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) has played a major role in the history and formation of the country. This public, autonomous and lay institution's fundamental tasks are teaching, research and culture dissemination. UNAM is a space of various freedoms where respect, tolerance and dialogue are practiced on a daily basis. Ideas and thought plurality is appreciated as a sign of its richness. Created in 2017, the Editorial Laboratory of UNAM's School of Architecture aims to become a leading research center for the study of the cultural history of the printed media and information technologies related to the history of architecture and urbanism. Its mission is to promote critical dialogue between journals, books and information technologies, and the built environment. Its research, exhibitions, media projects and publications focus on these relationships. It seeks to be globally connected engaging audiences from national and international academic communities.