Guadalajara Industrial Park (or PIG, for its acronym in spanish) is an urban design exercise dealing, in general, with the exploitation of the latent value of industrial areas fallen into decadence. It finds its conceptual framing in the contemporary post-industrial condition (specifically in mexican society), in the rise of digital culture and the productive activities related to it, and in the approach to a wiser employment of spatial, material and energetic resources. Specifically, in each chapter or case, PIG relies in different interpretations of the value of industrial architecture, industrial culture, or the social conditions enhanced by the industrial.

This is a reedtion and reinterpretation done individually on the work produced in collaboration with Rigo Reyes as our BArch final project, for which we received honors on graduation.

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During the last years of the nineteenth century, the french-loving regime of dictator Porfirio Díaz brought to Mexico two cultural phenomenons whose ambiguous relationship remains relevant: positivism and romanticism – although they seem perfectly opposed, certain perspectives confound their obsessions and purposes. With its thirst for 'Order and Progress', Diaz's regime brought rail transportation in 1888 – meanwhile, Paris was erecting Eiffel tower; electricity, the telephone and the automobile closely followed. Among with these, it also brought the religious ecstasy of the neogothic Expiatorio temple (designed by Adamo Boari, french architect 'imported' by Diaz) and its sharpened spires, certain fancy for neoclassic sculpture, and the aesthetic mood that pervades the Americana borough (formerly know as the Porfirio Diaz borough).

This painting by Jose Ma. Velasco portrays the spirit of the time: progress marches on through the wild, and the furthermost of the mountains –là bàs… là bàs– merge with the clouds.

Since rail transportation was privatized during the last decade of the twentieth century, with a few touristic exceptions –one of which is a line that goes from Guadalajara to Tequila– mexican trains only carry goods. Following the privatization, the Mexican Rail Museum was built in a park a couple of blocks away from Zona Industrial, Guadalajara's biggest industrial area. The museum was composed of a locomotive and a couple of passenger coaches with their interiors preserved as in the good-old-days. Not too long after its opening ceremony, in 1999, the museum perished in a fire. What's left of it remain, profaned, in the park.

If the essence of romanticism is the celebration of man's individuality and its autonomy from any system outside of one's self, what is the relationship between the rise of the private over the public –in economy and politics– and romanticism? William Blake vs. Carlos Slim.

Although Ferromex (the privatized rail corporation) is considered a moderately successful enterprise, Guadalajara's large industrial areas served by it display a state of utter decadence. Simultaneously to the consolidation of the nostalgic character of the inner city's landscape (the landscape of what was and isn't anymore), more and more 'industrial parks' – which scarcely use the rail infrastructure – populate the outer city. More recently, based on the economic activities developed in these industrial parks, Guadalajara has gained the misnomer 'the Mexican Silicon Valley': no creative work is developed there, theirs is an enterprise of mere manufacture.

Ever since the privatization, a regional/urban plan, intended to deviate the railroad around the city, has been periodically revisited. Its implementation would rid the city of the unnecessary and annoying vicinity of the freight train and its industries.  Could the urban renovation following the Deviation Plan rid the city of its leaning towards transnational servility?

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Masterplan

As the inner city's industrials are relocated, and the rail's right-of-way is freed, passenger transportation is regained both in regional and urban scales; the red line extends the actual metro system (blue, orange and yellow lines), and multimodal nodes (the red dots in the figure) are located in strategic locations. Zooming in, urban design resources are acknowledged: railroads, their right-of-way and service areas, industries and warehouses, large urban parks; spatial limits are established for intervention and the area is divided in six pieces – of which, we will only refer C, D and F in this document.

C

C is the clearest example of the marginalizing effect of the railroad's urban incision. The poor live on one side, the well-off live on the other. In its interior, two wide strips run parallel to the rails: one consists of an enclosed flat surface where idle boxcars dwell among brand new automobiles waiting to be driven; the other strip consists of an irregular series of factories and warehouses. One of the two most notable factories is aligned with the axis  of Chapultepec Ave.–perpendicular to the strip axis–, probably the most lively spot of the city; notice the furnace: its visual punchline.

The intervention for this piece is rather simple: the flat surface of the first strip is kept as a series of parks and an atrium for the main industrial buildings, which are kept as well and reprogrammed as a cultural and research complex concerned with the history of the industrial. New buildings are scattered through the second strip along with the preserved warehouses and foundries and silos and mills. Enclosing walls are demolished and both parts of the city are reconnected through street-wide walkways. The railroad is buried underground and a metro line rolls through it.

D

The road that crosses this piece, Calzada Independencia –formerly know as, again, Calzada Porfirio Diaz– was built around 1910 over the river next to which the city was first established. This is the origin. Seen from north to south one can notice the following: an obelisk that celebrates Benito Juarez – the blessed heretic that divided State from Church in Mexico; surrounding the obelisk and under the shade of flowery trees, a square where, each Sunday, punks, darks, drunken bums and other misfits gather in urban ritual; beyond, the former city's train station – now central offices of Ferromex; beyond, a barely noticeable silo from Zona Industrial; and, at last, the favelas of Del Cuatro hill.

Intervention: Again, enclosing wall are demolished and walkways are laid in the additive intersection of visual axes from both sides; the negative space of these is built; mixed uses inhabit. Avenues are heavily reconfigured in plan and section. Juarez square is extended southwards; at a certain point, the floor level of the square starts to rise, diagonally, turning into a viewpoint for the southern cityscape; Del Cuatro hill's TV towers crown the view. Agua Azul, the large park, is also extended southwards; underneath its naïve pastoral hills, urban strata houses mixed use.

F

In 1957, just before Guadalajara's population reached its first million, and even before Mario Pani built the Unidad Habitacional Nonalco-Tlatelolco* in Mexico City, the first corbusian megablocks in Mexico were built in the city's deep south. Guadalajara's Zona Industrial is a neatly ordered catalog of Industrial Architecture, or, as the Becher's wanted, an ordered catalog of Calvinist Cathedrals*. In its interior, like in Michel Gondry's video for The Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar*, landscape elements are rhythmically related: the curtain gates are like a noisy bass-line, setting the beat; the ups and downs of the rooftops reflect a spare and repetitive melodic contour, bewitching like a mantra; the sharp verticality of the electricity posts signal the crashing of cymbals; the shape, texture and color of the cars, floor and walls transform also into sound. Here and there a few buildings rise in calvinistic ecstasy over the monotonous cadence of the warehouse landscape.

How do these industrial megablocks relate to tho ones built by Pani in Tlatelolco, the former that sprang from 'pure economic thinking' and the latter that sprang from idealistic humanism? What made Pani's megablocks possible? And, ultimately, 1968*.

Operative anachronism: The structural grid of a typical warehouse megablock is wide enough to share load-transmission area with a second structural system, enabling the superimposition of two cities. A second urban ground (+18m) hovers above the ground level (+0m). Penetrating through the ceilings of the existing warehouses, the main structural system is laid on a 150m by 150m grid; each member, being 18m wide squares, houses vertical circulation and infrastructural networks. A secondary structural system enacts when needed; diagonal circulations are scattered through the site, linking both cities continuously. Transportation: on ground level high-traffic roads (yellow) cross the site; local mobility is divided in two independent 300m by 300m grids: one for motor transportation (orange) and one for non-motor transportation (green). A bar-building is laid over the main structural system; a continuous mixed use bar-building. When the situation demands so –the crossing of high-traffic roads, the presence of a tall and remarkable industrial building, a park–, whole elements of the bar-building are subtracted. Like an artificial horizon or like a two-sided perforated looking-glass, the second ground element is a building in itself. What could happen in the width of such thing? What should?