Posted in CITIES, EDUCATION, FEATURES, LAM MAGAZINE, PARKS, PLANNING, PLANTS, RECREATION, SECURITY, STUDENTS, UNIVERSITY, VIEWS, tagged Centro Roberto Garza Sada, Cerro de las Mitras, Diego Gonzalez, grading, grasses, Jonathan Lerner, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, master plan, Mexico, Monterrey, Mountains, native species, Page, parking, pedestrian, plaza, Prohabitat, René Bihan, Roberto Pasini, San Pedro Garza García, Santa Catarina River, SECURITY, Sierra Madre mountains, slope, Suburb, SWA, Tadao Ando, Tatiana Bilbao, topography, trees, UNIVERSITY, University of Monterrey, VIEWS on April 26, 2018|
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As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.
Click above for a full PDF of the translated text with English text available below.
BY JONATHAN LERNER
Diego Gonzalez was driving through San Pedro Garza García, the poshest municipality in metropolitan Monterrey, one of the richest cities in Mexico. “When I was a kid, in the 1970s,” he said, gesturing broadly through the windshield, “all of this was agricultural. I came here hunting rabbits.” San Pedro is built out now. Its dominant typology is the single-family house, and its circulation patterns exist to serve cars, so it’s not unlike any late 20th-century North American suburb, except that it has an orthogonal grid instead of a dendritic street plan. Also, almost every property is enclosed within a high security wall. Gonzalez’s destination was the campus of the University of Monterrey (UDEM).
UDEM demarks San Pedro’s narrow western border, at a point where lateral ridges off the soaring Sierra Madre mountains pinch close to the Santa Catarina River. West of the campus, where the valley opens out a bit, a new suburb is being developed; land prices there have quadrupled in the past decade. When the university campus was first established in 1981, “it was in the country,” noted Gonzalez’s passenger, René Bihan, FASLA. “Now they are landlocked. They have no choice but to be smart about how they infill.” One of UDEM’s smart choices was to hire (more…)
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