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Ciudad Universitaria: World Heritage Site
By unanimous vote, the Ciudad Universitaria campus of the UNAM was included to the UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites at its convention held in New Zeeland on June 28, 2007, and it was officially enrolled on the World Heritage Site ledger on July 2, 2007.
According to the text of the communiqué: “The urbanism and architecture of the Central University City Campus of UNAM constitute an outstanding example of the application of the principles of 20th Century modernism merged with features stemming from pre-Hispanic Mexican tradition. The ensemble became one of the most significant icons of modern urbanism and architecture in Latin America, recognized at universal level.”
The design and construction of the Central University City Campus is the work of Mexican architects and workers, who from the perspective of the European rationalist school employ lines and materials of a nationalistic nature to achieve a unified, functional and aesthetic result that is enhanced by major works by leading artists of the Mexican muralist movement, including Edmundo O’Gorman, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and José Chávez Morado, whose contributions are absolutely singular and inimitable.
CU is situated on a 7,000+ year-old igneous flow known as the “Pedregal” in the south of Mexico City. Before moving to the new CU campus, the university was installed in diverse buildings in downtown Mexico City.
The CU World Cultural Site embraces the campus’s first circuit, originally inaugurated in 1952, and fifty buildings within the central nucleus consisting of 176.5 hectares, which constitutes about 25% of the entire campus complex. The site is delimited by the Olympic Stadium to the east, the Sports Complex to the south, the Faculty of Medicine to the west and the Faculties of Philosophy and Letters, Law and Odontology to the north.
References
http://www.unam.mx/patrimonio/index.html
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