Document: Architecture and Monument Restoration (1967)

This essay, the third and last of a series of lectures delivered at Colegio Nacional in Mexico City in 1966, laid out what Villagrán described as an "authentic theory of monument restoration," which upheld the importance of subjective creativity against the myth of objectivity inherent in the prevailing "zealous" archeological formulas to preserve buildings in stasis with no subsequent intervention. Villagrán, one of the principal Mexican modernist architects, justified the need to allow contemporary architects to intervene in historic monuments by portraying their work as a necessary form of aesthetic interpretation aimed at making the past intelligible to the present. The essay is also a tacit critique of the emerging postwar international institutional framework for historic preservation, as Villagrán maintained that architects required an innate cultural understanding of their own particular milieus, one which could only come through birth and which could not flow from purely technical knowledge.