The Media Construction of Verticality. High-Rise Buildings in Torreón in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Abstract

This article examines how the local press and architectural practice shaped the notion of verticality in Torreón during the first half of the twentieth century, addressing the problem of how a modern city in northern Mexico incorporated high-rise architecture into its urban imagination and repertoire. The objective is to reconstruct the media discourses and the cultural and technical, conditions that enabled the emergence of vertical buildings, as well as to analyze their meanings within the region’s modernizing project, primarily through architectural description. The study is grounded in a theoretical approach that integrates urban history, architectural culture, technological imaginaries, and architectural analysis. Methodologically, it combines systematic review of historical newspapers, consultation of archival documents, formal analysis of projects and buildings, and a hermeneutic reading of the skyscraper as concept. The results show that the local press produced an early skyscraper culture that preceded the construction of vertical buildings, shaping expectations of social acceptance and rejection. The study also identifies that buildings such as the Vallina, Río Nazas, Elvira, Seguros Monterrey, and Algodonero embodied a form of local modernity whose current fragility reflects processes of deterioration, substitution, and loss of meaning.