BUILDERS IN THE SUN
FIVE MEXICAN ARCHITECTS
Clive Bamford Smith
New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Inc., 1967. First edition. Quarto. Blue cloth decorated in gilt. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Umber endpapers. 224 pp. Fully illustrated in black and white. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Price clipped dust jacket with mild chipping to spine ends, and light wear to edges, so a very good to nearly fine copy in a very good to nearly fine dust jacket.
8.5 x 11 hardcover book with 224 pages and fully illustrated in black and white. Foreword by Dr. José Villagrán García. Facsimile signatures of O’Gorman, Barragán, Candela, Goeritz, and Pani as design elements for corresponding chapter dividers.
Contents
- Foreword
- Juan O’Gorman
- Luis Barragán
- Félix Candela
- Mathias Goeritz
- Mario Pani
Juan O'Gorman (Mexico, 1905 – 1982) was a Mexican painter and architect. In the 1920s he studied architecture at the Academy of San Carlos, the Art and Architecture school at the National Autonomous University. In 1929, O'Gorman purchased a plot containing two tennis courts in Mexico City's San Ángel colonia. On the plot, O'Gorman constructed a small house and studio intended for use by his father, now known as the Cecil O'Gorman House. The building's forms were strongly influenced by the work of Le Corbusier, whose theories of architecture O'Gorman studied. O'Gorman dubbed the house the first functionalist structure in Latin America.
Diego Rivera, a contemporary of O'Gorman, impressed with the design of the Cecil O'Gorman House, commissioned the architect to design a home for him and Frida Kahlo on an adjacent plot. The house was built in a similar functionalist style from 1931 to 1932. The Rivera-Kahlo house was two houses connected by a bridge. Both houses were purchased to be restored and opened to the public with the Rivera-Kahlo house operating as a museum.
In 1932, Narciso Bassols, then Secretary of Education, appointed O'Gorman to the position of Head of Architectural Office of the Ministry of Public Education, where he went on to design and build 26 elementary schools in Mexico City. The schools were built with the philosophy of "eliminating all architectural style and executing constructions technically."
After 6 years of functionalist projects, O'Gorman turned away from strict functionalism later in life and worked to develop an organic architecture, combining the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright with traditional Mexican constructions.
Juan O'Gorman's most celebrated work due to its creativity, construction technique, and dimensions, are the four thousand square meters murals covering the four faces of the building of the Central Library at Ciudad Universitaria at UNAM. These murals are mosaics made from millions of colored stones that he gathered all around Mexico in order to be able to obtain the different colors he needed. The north side pictures Mexico's pre-Hispanic past and the south facade its colonial one, while the east wall depicts the contemporary world, and the west shows the university and contemporary Mexico.
"From the beginning, I had the idea of making mosaics of colored stones in the walls of the collections, with a technique in which I was already well experienced. With these mosaics the library would be different from the other buildings of Ciudad Universitaria, and it would be given a particular Mexican character."
O'Gorman built and designed his own house in the suburb of Pedregal, which was part built structure part natural cave, which is known as "The Cave House" from 1953 to 1956. It was decorated with mosaics throughout. It was demolished in 1969.
His paintings often treated Mexican history, landscape, and legends. A mural commission in Pátzcuaro, Michoacan resulted in the huge "La historia de Michoacán" in the Biblioteca Pública Gertrudis Bocanegra in a former church. He painted the murals in the Independence Room in Mexico City's Chapultepec Castle, and the huge murals of his own 1952 Central Library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, designed with Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco.
In 1959, together with fellow artists, Raúl Anguiano, Jesús Guerrero Galván, and Carlos Orozco Romero, O'Gorman founded the militant Unión de Pintores y Grabadores de México (Mexican Painters and Engravers Union).
One of Mexico's greatest architects, Luis Ramiro Barragán Morfín (1902 – 1988) revolutionized modern architecture in the country with his use of bright colors reminiscent of the traditional architecture of Mexico, and with works such as his Casa Barragán, the Chapel of the Capuchinas, the Torres de Satélite, "Los Clubes" (Cuadra San Cristobal and Fuente de los Amantes), and the Casa Gilardi, among many others.
Barragán was born in Guadalajara, graduating as a civil engineer and architect. Two years later in 1925, he started on a journey of two years in Europe, where he was impressed by the beauty of the gardens of the cities he visited and the strong influence of Mediterranean and Muslim culture, and above all of the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts. It was on this trip where his interest in landscape architecture began.
The atmosphere of the gardens marked what would be his architectural work, integrating straight and solid walls and courtyards open to the sky. With a career of over 30 built works, his combination of lively block colors and serene gardens earned him the Pritzker Prize in 1980, the Jalisco Award in 1985; finally, a year before his death Barragán received Mexico's National Architecture Award.
In recent years, the discussion around Barragán's work has been rekindled thanks to the bizarre circumstances surrounding his archive. In 1995, the archive was purchased by Rolf Fehlbaum, Chairman of the furniture company Vitra, as an engagement gift for his fiancé Federica Zanco. Since then, the archive has been largely off-limits to researchers as Zanco has attempted to organize and catalog the archive, but many have been angered by the lack of access. The situation came to a head in 2016, when artist Jill Magid presented Zanco with a diamond engagement ring made from the ashes of Luis Barragán himself, in the hope of persuading Zanco to provide researchers more access to her original engagement gift.
Félix Candela Outeriño (Spain, 1910 – 1997) was a Spanish and Mexican architect who was born in Madrid and at the age of 26, emigrated to Mexico, acquiring double nationality. He is known for his significant role in the development of Mexican architecture and structural engineering. Candela’s major contribution to architecture was the development of thin shells made out of reinforced concrete, popularly known as cascarones.
In 1927 Candela enrolled in La Escuela Superior de Arquitectura (Madrid Superior Technical School of Architecture), graduating in 1935; at which time Candela traveled to Germany to further study architecture. Early after he started classes, he developed a very keen sense of geometry and started teaching other students in private lessons. In his junior year, his visual intelligence and his descriptive geometric and trigonometric talent helped him catch the eye of Luis Vegas. Vegas was his material strength professor, and gave Candela the honorary title of “Luis Vegas’ Helper”. While “helping” Vegas, Candela entered many architecture competitions and won most of them. Unlike many of his peers, Candela didn’t show intellectual or aesthetic efforts in school. He didn’t even like pure mathematics. When Candela was a student in Madrid, the schools taught the theory of elasticity where Candela assisted the professors and even tutored other students.
His studies ended very quickly when the Spanish civil war began in 1936. When Candela returned to Spain to fight, he sided with the republic and fought against Franco. Candela became a Captain of Engineers for the Spanish republic after a short period of time. Unfortunately, while participating in the civil war, Candela was imprisoned in the Perpignan Concentration camp in Perpignan, France until the end of the war in 1939. Candela had fought against Franco; therefore he could not stay in the new Spain as long as Franco was the head of state. After his name was selected with a few hundred other prisoners, Candela was put onto a ship bound for Mexico, where he would start his career. He landed in Acapulco later that year.
As an expert of paraboloid and hyperbolic geometry, he was drawn to experiment on a series of residential and commercial shell-shaped structures since the beginning of his career. Candela evaluated both the artistic and the cost-saving aspects of this kind of design choice.
Candela worked very hard during his lifetime to prove the real nature and potential reinforced concrete had in structural engineering. Reinforced concrete is extremely efficient in a dome or shell like shape. This shape eliminates tensile forces in the concrete. He also looked to solve problems by the simplest means possible. In regard to shell design, he tended to rely on the geometric properties of the shell for analysis, instead of complex mathematical means and he followed the works of Eduardo Torroja in Europe and Guillermo Gonzalez Zuleta in America. Around 1950 when Candela's company went to design laminar structures, he started researching journals and engineering articles for as much information as he could find. From this, he started questioning the behaviour of reinforced concrete with the elastic assumptions and concluded they are in total disagreement with each other. (Faber 1963) Candela has said on more than one occasion that the analysis of a structure is a sort of "hobby" to him.
Félix Candela worked as an architect upon his arrival in Mexico until 1949 when he started to engineer many concrete structures utilizing his well-known thin-shell design. Candela did most of his work in Mexico throughout the 1950s and into the late 60s. He was responsible for more than 300 works and 900 projects in this time period. Many of his larger projects were given to him by the Mexican government, such as the Cosmic Rays Pavilion. In 1956, Mexican President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines said “Nothing could be more serious than to sit in the shade of the buildings we are about to build,” foreshadowing the many construction projects to come. Ruiz Cortines came up with a budget to enable his construction declaration to come true, requesting 81,200,000 (pesos) more funding than was used in 1955. Luckily for Candela, 20,300,000 (pesos) of this funding was to go towards public works. Candela also benefited from the budget implemented by Ruiz Cortines in the area of education. Candela became a professor in Mexico, which is what he did for the remainder of his career. Felix moved to the United States and taught at University of Illinois at Chicago from 1971-1978.
Werner Mathias Goeritz Brunner (Germany, 1915 - 1990) was a well-known Mexican painter and sculptor of German origin. After spending much of the 1940s in North Africa and Spain, Goeritz and his wife, photographer Marianne Gast, immigrated to Mexico in 1949.
Mathias Goeritz began studying philosophy and the history of art at Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität, now known as the Humboldt University of Berlin, in 1934.Goeritz received a doctorate in art history from this institution in 1940. His doctoral dissertation on the nineteenth-century German painter Ferdinand von Rayski was published as Ferdinand Von Rayski und die Kunst des Neunzehnten JahrhundertsDuring the course of his studies, Goeritz also trained as an artist at the Kunstgewerbe- und Handwerkerschule in Berlin-Charlottenberg (Applied arts and tradesmen's school), where he studied drawing with German artists Max Kaus and Hans Orlowski. Upon completion of his doctorate, Goeritz worked at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie (National Gallery), now the Alte Nationalgalerie, under the supervision of nineteenth-century art specialist Paul Ortwin Rave. In early 1941, in the midst of the Second World War, Goeritz left Germany, settling first in Tetuan, Morocco. He and photographer Marianne Gast married in 1942, and the couple settled in Granada, Spain just after the war ended in 1945.
In the summer of 1948, Goeritz and Ferrant traveled to visit the prehistoric paintings of the Cave of Altamira in the north of Spain, along with writer Ricardo Gullón and others. It was then that Goeritz proposed the founding of an Escuela de Altamira (Altamira School), an association of artists and writers who would meet annually near the Cave, in 1948. The Escuela de Altamira would ultimately hold two meetings, in 1949 and 1950.
Through the intervention of Mexican architect Ignacio Díaz Morales, Goeritz was offered a job teaching art history to the students of the newly founded Escuela de Arquitectura in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1949. In 1953 he first presented his "Manifiesto de la Arquitectura Emocional" (Emotional Architecture Manifesto) at the pre-inauguration of the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, which he designed in 1952-53. Goeritz also collaborated with Luis Barragán to make monumental abstract sculptures in reinforced concrete during the 1950s, including El animal del Pedregal (The Animal of the Pedregal, 1951) and the Torres de la Ciudad Satélite (Towers of Satellite City, 1957).
Mathias Goeritz exhibited widely in Mexico and beyond throughout his life, and had a significant influence on younger Mexican artists such as Helen Escobedo and Pedro Friedeberg.
Mario Pani Darqui (Mexico, 1911 – 1993) was a famous Mexican architect and urbanist. He was one of the most active urbanists under the Mexican Miracle, and gave form to a good part of the urban appearance of Mexico City, with emblematic buildings (nowadays characteristic of Mexico City), such as the main campus of the UNAM, the Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlatelolco (following Le Corbusier's urban principles), the Normal School of Teachers (Mexico), the National Conservatory of Music and other big housing projects called multifamiliares.
Mario Pani was born in Mexico City. He studied architecture in France and Mexico, and later on he would found the National College of Architects (Mexico) in 1946. In 1938, he began the journal Arquitectura Mexico, which was published until 1979. He introduced the international style in Mexico, and was the first promoter of big housing Tower block projects. Pani was a great innovator of the urban design of Mexico City, and was involved in the construction of some of its newer parts, developing or participating in the more ambitious and important city-developing plans of the 20th century in Mexico, like Ciudad Satélite (along with Domingo Garcia Ramos and Jose Luis Cuevas), Tlatelolco, the Juárez and Miguel Alemán tower blocks, and the condominium in Paseo de la Reforma, the first of its type in Mexico.