The Mexican architect and restorer Sergio Zaldívar, in a file image.INAH
The Mexican architect Sergio Zaldívar believed that temples are "the thirstiest architectural syntax of eternity to which every city aspires when it is founded."
He said it paraphrasing the writer Vicente Quirarte.
“Eternity as a testimony of the most tangible and permanent construction of the passage of a group of beings through the world”.
That is why, he thought, they cannot disappear.
Zaldívar, who restored the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City and saved it from sinking, has died this Tuesday at the age of 87.
The architect had been admitted to the hospital for a gastric problem, according to local media reports. The National Academy of Architecture has lamented the death of the restorer and the Secretary of Culture, Alejandra Frausto, has expressed on Twitter that the country "loses a brilliant mind, a great restorer and a specialist in the conservation of cultural heritage monuments." Zaldívar, who was the first head of the National Palace Conservation Department, was a pillar of restoration in Mexico.
His intervention in the Metropolitan Cathedral began in 1988 after an intense rain flooded the Sagrario Mayor. Between 1900 and 1980 the building had sunk eight meters. The collapse had not been even since the building had been built on clay soil and on top of pre-Hispanic buildings destroyed during the Conquest. Zaldívar, who was head of the General Directorate of Sites and Monuments of Cultural Heritage in 1988, called a group of specialists to solve the leveling. After several attempts, they managed to stabilize the religious building and reverse the sinking by more than 90 centimeters. In those years, the Italian Government invited the architect to share his experience with the committee studying the rescue of the Tower of Pisa.
Zaldívar studied architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and continued his training at the Sapienza University in Rome. During his career, apart from the works in the Metropolitan Cathedral, he intervened in the Treasury Hall of the National Palace, the old collegiate church of the Basilica of Guadalupe, the Marqués del Apartado building and in the old Archbishopric, in the Historic Center of Mexico City. ; the temple of the Santos Reyes, in Hidalgo, and that of Santa Isabel Tepetzala, in Puebla. For his work, the architect received distinctions such as the Hermenegildo Galeana award, given by the College of Architects of Mexico, or the Federico Sescosse award from the International Council of Sites and Monuments of Mexico. He also obtained the maximum lifetime distinction granted by the National Academy of Architecture, which named him emeritus architect.
When, in 2017, he was awarded the July 7 medal for his career in rescuing national heritage, he thanked the award, but also made a call to "take care of monuments" and protect heritage: "Tourism is paradoxical because it leaves money, but it destroys the patrimony.
In cities like Rome, Venice or Barcelona there are already people against tourism, they can't stand it.
I think we are the only ones who take advantage of it regardless of whether towns or cities stop their natural course of development: rather than trying to have more appointments, we have to take care of the monuments we have and take care of them”.
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