page_title: Agustín Landa Verdugo
section_title: Urban Planning
hierarchical_section_title: Agustín Landa Verdugo / Urban Planning
caption_attribution_description: Plan Maestro de Infratur para la Zona Hotelera y Urbana
context_page_description: Agustín Landa Verdugo was a Mexican architect and urban planner, born in Mexico City. He studied architecture in the National University of Mexico. In 1945 he established a firm with his brother Enrique, with whom he designed hundreds of public and private buildings during four decades of partnership. The firm's work distinguished itself by its modern language and the efficiency and economy of the solutions it proposed.
  The work of Landa Verdugo's firm was influential in many areas of architecture in Mexico, including the design of hospitals and social housing, where its pioneering designs became standards for younger architects.
  As an urban planner, Agustin Landa Verdugo was the author of the master plan of a number of new cities and neighborhoods in Mexico, most notably the city of Cancún, which was built in the early 1970s in an uninhabited island in the state of Quintana Roo.
context_section_description: The first major urban planning project by Landa Verdugo was the master plan of Ciudad Sahagún, in the state of Hidalgo. In the early fifties, as the country's economy was rapidly industrialized, new spaces for large factories were required, outside the saturated major cities of the country. President Miguel Alemán thus commissioned Landa Verdugo's firm to conceive a new city, in an agricultural valley to the north-east of Mexico City. The commission included the design of the urban layout as well as housing, commercial spaces and the facilities for two of the factories that would operate in the new city.
  In the late 1960s, Landa Verdugo's firm undertook other ambitious urban design projects. Hired by the Bank of Mexico, the architect was a member of the committee that selected the sites for new tourist centers in the Mexican coast.  The sites that were chosen were Cancún, Ixtapa, in the coast of the state of Guerrero, Huatulco, in Oaxaca, and Los Cabos and Loreto in the state of Baja California Sur. 
  Agustin Landa Verdugo's firm then began drawing the plans of the new tourist centers. In the case of Cancún, since there was no town in the site selected, the city was built from scratch. Ixtapa, on the other hand, was built next to the preexisting town of Zihuatanejo. Both projects contemplated areas for hotels, a convention center, luxury housing, golf courses as well as housing and services for the city's permanent population.
   The master plan of Cancún consists of a 12-kilometer strip of hotels on a narrow island surrounded by the Caribbean on one side, and a lagoon on the other. The city of Cancún is located on firm land, to the north-west of the island, and is organized in super-blocks with irregular shapes. Each of these super-blocks has internal pedestrian circulations, large park areas and a core with basic services.
  In addition to the master plan, Landa Verdugo designed Cancún's first hotel, Hyatt Cancún Caribe, the control tower and hall of the temporary airport that was used during the construction of the city, from 1969 to 1974, and the first houses and camping grounds that were used by the engineers and construction workers that first arrived to work in Cancún.
  Landa Verdugo's firm also worked on projects for other tourist cities. From 1974 on, however, these were developed within the government agency that coordinated these projects (FONATUR).
caption: Master Plan of the city of Cancun
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