'Rerighting'History The Benito Juarez Community Academy

摘要

Who makes architecture? To ask this question in Harvard Design Magazine might seem redundant, but I would like to ask it about a very specific and iconic building in Chicago-the Benito Juarez Community Academy. Almost unknown to the architecture community, it is a monument for and by the Pilsen and Little Village communities, and it is a testament to the 1968-1974 student and grassroots groups' protests against the segregated Chicago Public Schools (CPS).According to a local newspaper, El Manana: Primero y Unico Diario en Espanol, the three-story high school was "the first in the city to reflect an ethnic culture influence in its design. It is named in honor of Benito Juarez, a 19th-century Mexican hero who twice became President of Mexico. The facility provides an environment of cultural familiarity and ethnic identification for some 1,700 Latin American students." The school is organized in two major rectangular floor plans, both articulating slanted volumes with the exterior walls, through different gestures, that El Manana argues "symbolize the sloping walls of Mayan and Aztec architecture." The main academic building containing the classrooms is organized around a three-story patio that serves as a gathering place for the community as well as for the students. The second volume, the physical education building, carries on its exterior wall the iconic mural A La Esperanza.