Overview of the Palacio de los Deportes in the urban context. Image © ProtoplasmaKid via Wikipedia under license CC BY-SA 4.0 When Mexico City hosted the Olympics in 1968 , it was the first time the Games had been awarded to a Latin American country as well as the first time for a Spanish-speaking nation to host them. This made the games a good opportunity to project Mexico and its culture internationally, thus prompting the government to constitute an organizing committee with prominent local talent. They appointed Pedro Ramírez Vázquez as its president, a Mexican architect who held significant influence over the state's mid-century building program. His approach was explicit: architecture as a synthesis of international modernist technique with Pre-Columbian references and local material culture.…