mexico city, xochimilco

The image shows one of the Xochimilco’s garden-lined canals originally coaxed—and still cultivated—by organically landfilling an ancient lake. The right side of the canal has been shored and concretized but the left bank remains in its original earthen form. The trees growing along the bank were planted to prevent aqueous erosion. Their densely netted root structures act as an effective landscape cloth. Let me call your attention to the festooned flotillas you might have missed floating in the foreground, each with a built-in table, room for fifteen or twenty, and an oversized paper mache faceplate on front. I imagine the scene would be a bit more active if I had come during the weekend. The boats number in the thousands. Unleashed, they must be an awesome sight. Finally, in the distance undulate the impossibly thin concrete curves of Felix Candela’s Los Manantiales, a restaurant constructed in 1958. This building haunted my structural engineering lectures for years but I never quite understood how it sat in the landscape. It’s under renovation at the moment but I did manage to scramble under its petals for a quick snap-happy look around.