Review: Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital, by Kathryn E. O'Rourke

Abstract

During the early years of the twentieth century, many Mexican architects, like their peers in other parts of the world, were determined to produce a modern architecture specific to their nation. This ambition fueled a prolific debate about what constituted Mexican identity. Mexican architects, consequently, set themselves the task of making both a new architecture and a new architectural history. This concern for creating a national architectural history defined their designs throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In Modern Architecture in Mexico City, Kathryn E. O'Rourke draws from this context and argues that the foundations of Mexican modernism are to be found in the first texts on Mexican colonial architectural history. In a parallel reading of those texts and buildings, she explores the primacy of Mexican architects' interest in the representational qualities of national themes. O'Rourke asserts that these buildings were “meant to be seen and ‘read,’” and as a result, their architects helped to create “one of the most complex systems of visual culture in the twentieth century” (5).O'Rourke argues that Mexican modernist architects were generally inattentive to innovations in plan and section. Instead, their work displayed a preference for façadism, and for this reason, it contrasted with contemporary European and U.S. works of modern architecture. O'Rourke also claims that this strand of Mexican modernism has been neglected because scholars of Mexican modern architecture have tended to interpret buildings in terms of social and political conditions, which has led to the privileging of rationalist vocabularies and a dismissal of representational qualities. These points underlie O'Rourke's contention that Mexican modernist architects used wall surfaces and façades as representational planes for nationally specific imagery, which they considered fundamental.The first part of the book, “Colonial Concepts for Modern Mestizos,” begins with a chapter that traces the intellectual roots of Mexican modernism through the celebration, documentation, interpretation, and representation of colonial buildings by early twentieth-century scholars, architects, and photographers. In his 1901 book Spanish-Colonial Architecture in Mexico—the first history of the country's colonial architecture—Sylvester Baxter explained that architecture's distinctiveness by highlighting its fusion of Spanish forms and indigenous techniques.1 Baxter saw this fusion surviving in the work of contemporary craftspeople. His history provided key concepts for the development of a national modern architecture, essentially inventing the idea of “Mexican architecture.” Baxter's book and other related histories of the era pointed to the visual effects of surfaces and façades, principally those of Churrigueresque and baroque buildings.In chapter 2, O'Rourke focuses on Carlos Obregón Santacilia's first major work, the Ministry of Health (1926). This building showed that references to Mexican architectural history, international modern classicism, and art deco could coexist with references to folk art and ample use of applied decoration. In chapter 3, O'Rourke examines the Venustiano Carranza Recreation and Athletic Center for Workers (1929), by Juan Segura. References to colonial architecture for mass audiences were used here in a style that resisted categorization and revealed an absence of agreement on what “Mexican architecture” should look like.In the second part of the book, “Images, Absence, and Otherness,” O'Rourke tackles well-known figures and buildings that, after a long period of experimentation, crystallized international awareness and understanding of Mexican modern architecture. Here, however, her arguments lose some of their earlier strength and clarity. The first chapter in this section, chapter 4, deals with Juan O'Gorman, who is perhaps best known for denying the possibility of defining a Mexican modern architecture. Yet, as O'Rourke explains, the famous conjoined houses in San Ángel that he designed for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (1930–31) and the urban and rural elementary schools he built for the city government during the first half of the 1930s are all “profoundly imagistic” (163). O'Gorman, the author argues, “composed pictorially …. He borrowed literally and imagistically for his own buildings” from illustrations found in Le Corbusier's 1923 Vers un architecture (186). Rather than applying overly historicized ornament or other elements, O'Gorman used native plants and brightly colored walls to nationalize his buildings. Similar borrowings of themes from European sources, in tandem with others from local contexts, are found in many avant-garde designs from around the world.Regardless of his interest in Le Corbusier, says O'Rourke, O'Gorman's defense of functional architecture shows that he “profoundly misunderstood” the Swiss architect's work (165). After discussing the ambiguous disposition of spaces in the Rivera–Kahlo houses, she surprisingly claims that O'Gorman's “focus on modularity and efficiency blinded the architect to two of Le Corbusier's most important contributions to modern architecture: innovation in plan and section” (188). One could argue, however, that O'Gorman intentionally manipulated the lessons of Le Corbusier, not because he “missed or dismissed” the architect's “central arguments” about design aesthetics, but because he did not feel the need to follow them uncritically (185). O'Rourke concludes that O'Gorman understood colored wall surfaces in much the same ways as Segura and Obregón Santacilia: as pictorial surfaces, and not, as so many Europeans saw them, as vehicles for “experiment[ing] with spatial perception” or as “means of differentiating spaces” (214). However, she does not adequately explain how she has come to this conclusion. O'Rourke reads the buildings' façades and surfaces perhaps too pictorially, with little concern for other technical, programmatic, or political issues, all of which were important to the Mexican avant-garde. This incomplete analysis partially explains why she does not acknowledge spatial innovations before the 1950s.In chapter 5, O'Rourke analyzes Mexico City's Ciudad Universitaria (CU), or University City, of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1949–54) as the signature example of a “Mexicanized” modernism in the postwar years. This ambitious project's architects aimed to create a design that would stand with the greatest works of Mexican architecture, largely by integrating giant mosaic murals into some of the key buildings. The CU stood at the center of an increasingly complex debate during the 1950s, one grounded in a deepening study of architectural history and theory carried out in books, journals, conferences, and exhibitions—and, in large part, by the CU's own architects. According to O'Rourke, the CU's ample use of volcanic rock and other indigenous materials, combined with the architects' sensitivity to local landscape, marked a decisive shift away from the sources of preceding decades. Given the importance of this project and its representational aspirations, her analysis would have benefited—as would other sections of her book—from more attention to reception. O'Rourke describes the CU as a radical, new, subjective spatial experience, one based on texts by Alberto T. Arai (one of the project's designers) discussing the sense of estrangement often experienced by visitors to pre-Columbian ruins. In contrast to the work of his predecessors, O'Rourke maintains, Arai's ideas implied a far more nuanced, psychologically complicated way of nationalizing historical forms.Unsurprisingly, O'Rourke's last chapter is devoted to Luis Barragán, who has long been praised for integrating elements of modernism with vernacular and colonial themes. His brightly painted walls “have been interpreted widely as evidence of yet another, and perhaps the quintessential, ‘Mexicanization’ of architectural modernism” (284). One wonders why O'Rourke describes Barragán's approach as involving “distillations and abstractions of the color in Mexican folk art” (299) when she has not said the same of O'Gorman, who also employed planes of color in his designs. Barragán, she adds, “like his colleagues, selectively abstracted and reinterpreted images and forms from a variety of sources to shape buildings that … many have read as nationally specific” (285). Here—as with her discussion of Arai, whose buildings at the CU, inspired by ancient pyramids, cannot be explained in terms of their façades—O'Rourke's argument about façadism is difficult to follow. Barragán is well known for his dismissal of façades and his high level of spatial experimentation, yet O'Rourke claims that “the studied nonchalance of exteriors that disappeared into historical … streets made Barragán at least as fully a facadist as any of his colleagues” (284–85).Mexican architectural history has been shaped in part by foreign observers who helped to establish the idea that certain buildings were expressive of national character. It was often these authors who sought out relationships between ancient pyramids or colonial convents and modern architecture. Perhaps unwittingly, O'Rourke joins them in seeking the expression of national character in façades and surfaces. Her book does little to explain the “shaping of a capital” that the subtitle promises, since, with the exception of the CU, the buildings that provide the book's case studies had little impact on Mexico City's broader urbanism. O'Rourke does not attend to the vast majority of the city's buildings—the everyday architecture that shaped the capital—much less consider how these contributed to people's experience of the city.Still, the book's contributions to the study of Mexican architecture are substantial, found mainly in O'Rourke's carefully researched and meticulously presented case studies, which open new paths for investigation and offer much to careful readers. As a general overview, the book is of great value, deepening and widening our understanding of the intellectual and cultural contexts in which modernism arose in Mexico.