Satelite's Towers

Mario Pani commissioned architects Luis Barragan and Matias Goeritz to design a monument to mark the entrance to Ciudad Satelite. This monument consists of five concrete towers with triangular plans painted red, blue, yellow and white on an elongated plaza surrounded by a freeway. 

As the rest of Satelite, the towers are automobile-oriented: they are best seen from a car. As you drive north towards Satelite they appear unexpectedly, and the street points straight ahead at them. As you approach them you realize their incredible size. Not until you are a couple dozen meters from the towers does the road turn and makes you circle around them. 

A couple years ago, the Mexico City government built a second freeway over the southern section of the freeway that leads to Satelite, to alleviate traffic. Now there are plans to build a second level on the freeway's northern end as well. Even if the towers themselves are not touched, the modification of the freeway that leads toward them would make the experience of them quite different. This would be a tragedy. 

Mexico's Ciudad Satelite was Conceived as an American Suburb

In the late fifties there was a water shortage in Mexico City, so efforts began to direct urban growth beyond the valley where the city was located. Mario Pani, an outstanding architectural and urban innovator, conceived "Ciudad Satelite," a new neighborhood designed to function as an independent town, connected to Mexico City by a freeway. 

A visit to Satelite today makes it clear that Pani's inspiration was the post-war American Suburb, with winding streets and houses with front and back yards--as opposed to the Cartesian street grid of traditional Mexican cities, and the preeminence of the enclosed central garden in Mexican architecture.

Another piece of evidence of what Pani envisioned for Satelite is the American-style shopping mall he designed as the new town's centerpiece--it was the first of its type in Mexico. This mall, on the freeway that communicates Satelite with Mexico City, was surrounded by a sizable parking lot. Architecturally, it was a box with no windows similar to those built in the United States during the fifties. (This building was later demolished, giving way to a much larger mall.)

In the end, Satelite did not turn out quite as Pani and its developers expected. Soon, it was swallowed by Mexico City and became just another urban neighborhood, with radical juxtapositions of use, and areas with high density and heavy traffic. What did remain of Pani's vision was a strong urban identity that is shared today by the people of Satelite.