The contemporary experience of Mexico City as an irrepressible spectacle of humanity is captured by Carlos Monsiváis in his essay “Identity Hour, or What Photos Would You Take of the Endless City?” But how did this marvelous yet dystopian mingling of people, space, and time come to be? Patrice Olsen’s Artifacts of Revolution attempts to answer this question by “reading” the “history of Mexico City and its place in the Revolution by way of the additions and alterations that occurred in its built environment” (p. xii).
Her account begins after 1910, when Mexico was in the throes of revolution, and closes with the end of the term of President Lázaro Cárdenas in 1940. It traces the rejection of Porfirian Francophilic architecture in the 1910s and the search for an “authentically Mexican” alternative in the 1920s. Olsen argues that, despite considerable stylistic pluralism, nationalists tended toward the neocolonial style to lay...
