Mario Schjetnan, FASLA, spoke with ASLA about his work on the Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, his own garden in Malinalco, and environmental justice in Mexico City.
On working in the 500-year old Chapultapec Park in Mexico City, Schjetnan says: “The challenge was to intervene in the park through a restoration which addressed important issues, such as infrastructure and forestry conditions, services, vendors and redistribution of visitors (several places were under-used and others over-used). In other words, we could not do a “cosmetic” intervention. Also, we need to re-establish the notion of Chapultepec as an important historical and botanical place, not just the accumulation of masses of people visiting certain popular “attractions.”"
Schjetnan describes the vision behind his own house and garden in Malinalco, which won a 2007 ASLA Residential Design Honor Award. “My house in Malinalco represents an oasis for me and my family, a place away (but fairly close) from Mexico City, to entertain and have friends and family. A place to think and read. To establish a contrast to the lifestyle of Mexico City in a traditional Mexican town. The concept was to have a house and garden, or maybe a garden and a house, inextricably intertwined. To erase the outdoor-indoor dichotomy. To have a microcosmos of stone, water, trees and plants, with an architecture of timeless quality and a reference to traditional houses in the town without trying to copy or reproduce.”
Mexico City is both a first world and third world city, Schjetnan contends. “Mexico City and surroundings is an enormous conglomerate, a megalopolis of many contrasts. There is the world class city with its great museums, a few great parks and its deep history, with many European, pre-Hispanic and North American influences. A city with a certain sophistication in the arts, music, cinema and architecture, and a center with many important universities. But it’s also a third world mega-city of contrasts and contradictions: chaotic traffic, rapid growth and development, including an informal sector of enormous dimensions which erupt in street markets and vendors, uncontrolled squatter settlements, sub-cultures, illegal taxis and air pollution. Parks and open space play an important role within this described context — not only as social spaces for people of poor and middle incomes, but as urban elements of order and reference, and ecological balance. Parks are spaces that make the city “breath”.”
