Super Servicio Lomas

Super Servicio Lomas is a modernist masterpiece dating from the 1940s, and partly lost during 2010 and 2011. Already catalogued as an Artistic Monument by the INBAL, the building is unusual, but even a glimpse allows one to see the exceptional character, fluidity, and quality of the mid-century when the building came to be.

The building was the project of Russian-born, and later naturalized architect, Vladimir Kaspé. He began work on a mixed-use auto-dealership and service station here in 1946. It was one of Kaspé’s first projects after he was licensed to practice as an architect in Mexico. The GM dealer opened in 1948 and remained in operation for some 50 years thereafter.

The station included upper levels overlooking the park. The triangular composition of the building still lends itself to the design’s progress functionalist profile. The building’s fate was severely threatened in 2007 when plans for a giant tower called for its outright demolition. That project was entirely canceled soon after. But the Super Servicio Lomas was still partly lost when it was integrated into the Torre Virreyes complex. The neighboring complex was designed by  architect Teodoro González de León. He managed to preserve some 320 square meters of the older complex, some of which is today a museum.

But Kaspé’s original vision was more than anything modified by the passage of time. The City no longer needed unique locally-owned and low-profile road-side services. The entire Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood outgrew its bounds, and then outgrew the city too. Today, the old horizontal, prairie-style service station is lucky to be on the eastern edge of the neighborhood, and the western edge of the park. It might well be entirely lost within the increasingly vertical neighborhood just beyond.

It’s a remarkable point on the intersecting Cuernavaca Railroad Bikeway, and despite the looming tower above, a remarkable vision from the 20th century.