Three Views on Salto del Agua is a book of three insightful essays on the architecturally based film, Salto del Agua, a collaborative project by conceptual artist Anton Vidokle and sound engineer Cristian Manzutto. The10-minute Super 8 film focuses its lens on the facade of an unremarkable building in Mexico City – a public transportation station that would otherwise go unnoticed in the urban sprawl. Built in the late-sixties in the center of Mexico City, the building represents a moment in the city’s history shortly following 1968 Olympics, when idealistic hopes of ‘progress’ infused civic design.

The film presents a highly abstract experience of the building as a graphic system that “flattens the sinewy edifice into pure surface as sign,” according to Lauri Firstenberg and Peter Zellner. Their essay “Sign as Surface” focuses on the implications of Vidokle’s depiction of modernist architecture as ornamental, decorative design as opposed to an expression of functional and mechanical imperatives as it is commonly believed to be. Gabriel Kuri’s essay “Duration / Replay / Fact / Construction / Format” discusses Vidokle and Manzutto’s sophisticated use of formal filmic strategies in Salto del Agua and Gilbert Vicario writes on the film’s “CinematicArchitecturalTypography.”