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Mexican architecture.
The contemporary architecture in Mexico. The outbreak of the
revolutionary joust, two months after the celebrations of celebration of the
Centenary of Independence, not only gave term to the porfirista period of
government, but who forced to open a parenthesis in the architectonic activity
of the country. The National Theater and the Palace of the Congress - opposed
this last by the Arq. Antonio Rivas Market -, last samples of the historicist
eclecticism of the period, were unfinished. It is not but up to fifteen years
later, when beginning the process of recovery of the country, when the
manifestations corresponding to the period of transition are reflected in the
work of Obregón Santacilia and Mountain Francisco, among others, to evolve
later, through the nationalism and the geometricismo deco, towards the
rationalist modernism impelled by Jose Villagrán Garcia and their students
Enrique of the Moral, Juan Legarreta, Juan O´Gorman, Augusto Perez Palaces,
Enrique Yáñez and Antonio Muñoz. Villagrán excels by the influence, not only of
its work, but also of its ideology, on many generations of later architects to
already mentioned. From young person and just withdrawn of the architecture
school it shared his professional exercise with teaching, which maintained to
him near the information and updated.
It was of first in found out the changes that began to take place and the ideas
that animated them in the European architecture at the end of World War I. In
his first rationalist works perceive influences of Him Corbusier, Gropius and
others; reinterpreted them with own accents. After a brief period of association
with the Arq. Carlos Obregón Santacilia, Villagrán projected several buildings
for the health like the Institute of Hygiene and Sanitary Farm, in Popotla
(1925) and the Hospital for Tuberculoses in Huipulco (1929). The proposal of an
institutionalized Mexican Revolution like an element of cultural, political and
social promotion, as much to the interior as to the outside of the country,
showed in the movement of the muralism and the nationalistic painting and
sculpture; and integrated from the beginning to the new architectonic task by
Obregón Santacilia and Villagrán Garcia, it ended at a movement of plastic
integration that equipped the national rationalism with a strong influence that
pervade still to the sprouting of the functionalism, whose "inauguration" at
national level is indicated by the project and construction of the University
City, ample project coordinated by Mario Pani and Enrique of the Moral, and in
which takes part but of a hundred of architects.
When exhausting itself the language of the functionalism in Mexico; given
kidnapping that of task architectonic does great companies construction that
blooms in the alemanista height and its sequel - what it is in an engineering of
dressed buildings in fashion functionalist -, the experience and lessons of
Villagrán in the new creators of the architecture give to sustenance and new
impulse to the formalists expressions by cultural root, already present in the
own University City, and which the traditional plastic values stop being a
leaned element to the architecture to become origin and manifestation of the
same one. So it is the case of the set of frontons opened of the own University
City, designed by Alberto Arai, whose abstraction, purified and needs in its
material and forms, sends to the cultural roots of mesoamérica and, mainly, of
the plateau. As much Alberto Arai, as Matías Goeritz and Juan O´Gorman, along
with Luis Barragán, who defines and follows another parallel slope arisen from
the same intention of recovery and recreation of the own values glimpses like
the leaders in this tendency (to see "Thought of Luis Barragán here"). These
pioneers will leave in the young architects of the following generation, between
which they count Theodore Gonzalez of Leon, Augustine Hernandez, Alexander Zhon,
Alexander Case and Manuel Gonzalez Rul, one impront that pronounces constant or
intermittently in its later works. |
