Moral Exhibitionism and the Maison de Verre
Mr. Robert Rubin, who so generously opened his home to us this past Saturday, has asked that we not make interior photography of the Maison de Verre (MdV) freely available online. So, this blog post will be light on images. On the one hand, this is too bad: I was surprised to discover that, as much as the MdV interior has been beautifully documented in photographs, the wealth of ingenious details that abound—from the spring-loaded closures of the cabinetry, to the tiered bookshelves, to the removable chromed treads of the stairs—exceeds all the published photography I have seen.
On the other hand, photography (and certainly not mine) would not capture the subtlety of these details, and no still medium could capture their animation— the lively way they swing, articulate and pivot along their prescribed planes and arcs. Nor could photographs suggest their remarkable feel— the close tolerances, precise weighting and positive click that the furniture and cabinetry still have after 80 years; the way the doors close slowly by themselves. And the MdV is as much a house of grand, spatial gestures, as it is of minute, artisanal details. These too escape my photographs. So it really is for the best: I will try to describe here how the MdV feels.
The only photographs that I am able to post are of the facade, which is the aspect of the house I least want to illustrate. This is not because it is uninteresting, but rather because the MdV’s titular feature is so widely exposed. It does give me an opportunity, however, to discuss how the house has been represented photographically. Here it is, for example, as shot by François Halard, and included in Nicolai Ouroussoff’s New York Times review, “The Best House in Paris”:[1]
Maison de Verre facade (François Halard)
This lovely image is typical of recent representations of the home: a dead-on elevation of a monumental, glowing lantern. Yet my experience approaching the MdV that Saturday morning belied the expectations set by heroic images like these. Passing through the unassuming street entrance to 31 Rue-St. Guillaume, and into the small courtyard, the view surprised me. It is cropped out of these photos (even more by the NYT than in Halard’s original), but the MdV only occupies about two thirds of the vertical real estate of the masonry structure into which it is inserted. Its scale feels like an almost humble intervention— except, of course, for its formal audacity.
Facade (author)
The dead-on treatment also collapses perspective on a house one might expect to project into the courtyard. Yet on foot it becomes clear how much the MdV is truly built into its 19th century host, complicating the narrative of a monumental modern icon. (It should be noted that the upstairs neighbors, whose refusal to vacate introduced the peculiar constructional challenge of the MdV, some years ago renovated their facade to widen the windows and jettison a mansard roof, slightly lessening the starkness of the original stylistic disparity, and bowing to the modern character of the new construction they had resisted.)
Perhaps the greatest surprise in approaching the presumably luminous “House of Glass” is that, by the light of an overcast Parisian morning, the glass facade appears quite dull, even muddy— not far off, tonally, from the gray plaster of the adjacent wall. This quality changed with exposure to high sunlight, which emphasized the geometry of the circles inscribed within the glass brick lenses. These bricks have been replaced, after some cracking, with an approximation of the original sand-cast Nevada blocks produced by Saint-Gobain, which remain on the better-protected rear facade. The original glass has a slightly greener cast, thanks to its iron content, and creates a more intense dappling effect across a concave surface dimpled like a hammered metal bowl.
Flood light track on facade (author)
It is by night that the MdV famously glows. Light from within meets large floodlights attached to tracks projecting from the facade. Our tour leader, Mary Vaughn Johnson switched these lights on during the afternoon of our visit, so we could see their yellow-gold effect inside and out. Elevations of the facade foreshorten this scaffolding. In person, the projection of these tracks flanking the entry is hard to ignore, and creates the impression of approaching from behind-the-scenes of a stage set. Critics have observed not just the choreography of circulation in the MdV, but also the cinematic character of its interior.[2] It is striking, then, that even after seeing the apparatus of this home’s cinematic effects as one approaches, its immersive, dematerializing quality and intoxicating cinematic glamour are undiminished once we have set foot inside.[3]
Entry doorbells (author)
After ringing one of the doorbells to adapt the home’s programmatic function to the visitor (patient, guest or service call), all entrants pass down a narrow hall walled in glass to a secretary, who provides another sorting function. I will not attempt to describe the circulation of patients through Dr. Dalsace’s ground-floor medical practice in detail (he was a preeminent gynecologist, later nationally recognized for championing birth control), as it is better seen in plans. Yet I would like to comment on the remarkable choreography of privacy, professionalism and respect staged on this floor. A series of sliding doors, metal screens and different treatments of glass work as layers and veils to balance privacy and openness. Dr. Dalsace’s consultation room—backed by a double-height glass brick wall that telegraphs transparency and trust—has a desk with a rolling leaf on casters, so that he could maintain professional distance or lean in to hear patients’ privileged information, whispered in confidence. Seeing his patients out of the room, Dr. Dalsace was forced to bow deeply, as he ran the lock from high to low down its arc-shaped track.
The most dramatic experience of the home begins when social visitors turn a sharp left down the entry hall. An ostentatiously delicate hinge mounted on the ceiling slides a semicircular screen away, and leads to the grand, ship-ladder staircase, which faces the main facade’s double-height wall of glass. Mrs. Dalsace was said to receive visitors from the landing, silhouetted before a wall of glass, as her guests climbed the wide, railing-less stairs, which drop off vertiginously to either side— cinematic to be sure. Walking up myself, and convinced no one was looking, I had the urge to throw my arms out to either side while climbing these stairs— probing the space, and perhaps mimicking a tightrope walker, as one thinks keenly of balance.
Grand salon (Todd Eberle)
I was not able to capture the quality of light in the grand salon, though some very fine photographs do justice to the space. Analogies to a massive cinema screen are not far off, and the diffuse yet intense quality of light made me squint by midday. The effect is of natural daylight, albeit severed from the cues or distractions of nature—”a world within a world,” as Kenneth Frampton put it. The house feels clean, with light playing off every surface, and a sense of crisp clarity even affects the acoustic space. Mary Vaughn Johnson analogized the interior atmosphere by night to a casino, as it becomes difficult to note the passage of time. We took lunch in the grand salon, sitting on Mr. Rubin’s newer furniture (most of the originals are now in the collection of the Pompidou), but still resting our drinks on Chareau’s handmade brass fan table (I searched desperately for a coaster).
Mary urged us, during her excellent slideshow in the introduction, to resist coldly aestheticizing the house— seeing only line, light, shadow, and the industrial quality of the materials. This is surely the nature of most representations of the house, such as those of architectural photographer Todd Eberle.[4]
Electrical detail (Todd Eberle)
I have to confess, though, that it is difficult not to aestheticize the house in this way. The module of the glass bricks in the facade corresponds to the proportions in the furniture and even to the squares of round stud rubber flooring that resemble my childhood kitchen tiles— except these are now cracked like a rhino’s skin, with each tile progressing at a different rate of decay depending on its orginal batch of natural rubber. This geometry contributes to a sense of harmony in the house— that everything fits together in a certain way. This is what Chareau, Dalbet and Bijvoet were working out over the four-year, on-site design and construction process. The Maison de Verre reflects this precision, but never at the cost of warmth, lyricism, and even wit.
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Before I conclude, I want to turn briefly to one significant reception of glass architecture in the modernist historiography that relates closely to the MdV, and with which I tried to square my own impressions while visiting the home.
During the mid-1930s, Dr. Dalsace’s home served as a salon for Paris society members, Marxist intellectuals, and Surrealist artists and poets. In April of 1934 the German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who had fled Nazi Germany for Paris, was to give a series of five talks at the MdV on German literature and the current politics of the left. The talks were canceled on short notice when Dr. Dalsace took ill, with only fragmentary notes remaining. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that Benjamin knew the MdV well, and that it contributed to his position on glass architecture.
Shortly after fleeing Germany in 1933, Benjamin wrote the essay “Experience and Poverty.” Here he describes the social and cultural aftermath of the Great War, in which the value of experience had been destroyed in the face of unknown horror and new technology— for which man’s accumulated experience was wholly unprepared. This kind of “resetting” of experience has a virtue, he argues, in a “new, positive concept of barbarism,” for it forces the culture and its individuals to “start from scratch; to make a new start; to make a little go a long way.”
Benjamin takes architecture as a prime example of this new start. Deeply influenced by Sigfried Giedion’s book Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete of 1928, Benjamin singles out the new “constructors,” like those at the Dessau Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, and Adolf Loos (or artists “modeling themselves on the engineering spirit” like Paul Klee) as addressing this new condition. Benjamin champions modern materials like iron and glass— crucially put to modern formal uses, and rejects the decorated, historicist, bourgeois styles of the 19th century.
In particular, he celebrates the utopian writer Paul Scheerbart as a prophet of the new potential of glass architecture. Scheerbart dedicates his 1914 work Glass Architecture to the expressionist architect Bruno Taut, who in turn dedicates his 1914 Glashaus pavilion in Cologne to Scheerbart. (Scheerbart’s prophecies, which rhyme better but are no less eccentric in German, are emblazoned on the frieze of Taut’s pavilion; e.g., “Colored glass destroys hate.”) Kenneth Frampton notes that no conscious link can be proven between Scheerbart’s work and the MdV, but he nevertheless argues that the house “curiously echoes, however unconsciously, Scheerbart’s vision,” and that it embodies “an altogether richer and more total realization of this vision than either he or his professional alter-ego Bruno Taut were to achieve.” Remarkably, between Taut’s 1914 pavilion and the MdV, begun in 1928, “no structure exists in which glass lenses were used as the primary protective skin.”[5]
For Benjamin, the use of glass suggested by Scheerbart and realized at the MdV is a kind of cultural necessity. He writes in “Experience and Poverty”:
It is no coincidence that glass is such a hard, smooth material to which nothing can be fixed…. Objects made of glass have no ‘aura.’ Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of possession.[6]
Benjamin takes up the chorus of one of his artist/constructivist exemplars, Bertolt Brecht, when he declares “Erase the traces!” Such traces, Benjamin explains, typify the “cozy” bourgeois interiors of the 1880s, where “there is no spot on which the owner has not left his mark.
And in a 1929 essay on surrealism Benjamin would write:
Living in a glass house [like living with the doors open] would be a revolutionary virtue par excellence … an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need.[7]
Detlef Mertins aptly traced Benjamin’s influences in glass architecture to the group surrounding G magazine, to which he contributed, and in whose pages, for example, Theo van Doesburg would praise modern uses of glass by Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Adolph Loos and Frederick Kiesler. In 1923 van Doesburg would describe his own program for a house for the artist Léonce Rosenberg in a letter to him as follows:
Your atelier must be like a glass cover or like an empty crystal. It must have an absolute purity, a constant light, a clear atmosphere. It much also be white. The palette must be of glass. Your pencil sharp, rectangular and hard, always free of dust and as clean as an operating scalpel. One can certainly take a better lesson from doctor’s laboratories than from painters’ ateliers. The latter are cages that sting like sick apes.[8]
The MdV of course has the qualities of both an operating room (which it includes on the ground floor), and an artist’s studio, in the light-flooded grand salon— capitalizing on both the hygienic and atmospheric properties of glass brick.
As Maria Gough has noted, Benjamin’s reading of Scheerbart (influenced by figures like van Doesburg, who along with many Dadaists of the day, deeply revered Scheerbart) is much more interested in his constructive characteristics than his fanciful expressionistic ones (usually associated with Taut).[9] I would add that this is by no means a misreading of Scheerbart, whose 111 chapters on glass are as concerned with its phenomenal and spiritual effects as its functional properties and constructional requirements. The MdV thus embodies a vital, neglected side of Scheerbart. While he calls for colored glass, the thick translucent bricks of the MdV facade are still more for the atmospheric effect of diffuse light or “phenomenal transparency” that Scheerbart seems interested in than for any kind of literal transparency.[10] Similarly, Scheerbart’s focus on hygiene (he devotes a chapter to exterminating insects) was a central concern for Dr. Dalsace, in whose examination room microbes should leave no “traces” (to borrow Brecht’s term). Indeed, every surface of the examination roof is covered with glass, metal or tile— all non-porous, easily cleaned materials.
The poignancy of Gough’s article, entitled “Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde,” is to highlight Benjamin’s attempt to salvage a constructivist creative model in his new refuge of Paris that had just fallen to the right in Germany and to Party aesthetic policy in the Soviet Union. This is what he calls for in his April 1934 Paris speech-turned-essay, “The Author as Producer,” and perhaps what he might have suggested in the salon at the MdV, just six years before France would fall, and he would take his own life attempting to flee at the border to Spain.
To conclude by returning to Benjamin’s observation that “Glass is… the enemy of secrets and possession,” it is indeed true that the MdV remains impervious to some kinds of traces. For one thing, it is a difficult place for art collectors like Dr. Dalsace and Mr. Rubin alike to hang two-dimensional works. In this sense perhaps, it is an enemy of possession.
Nevertheless, a great paradox of the MdV is that it is in fact full of secrets— in many cases precisely about where to keep possessions (it is, after all, difficult to truly live without traces). One thinks of the full-height lacquered closets that appear as a wall along the second floor gallery; the plush lined drawers for silver, artfully concealed in the dining room; the separate, walled-off service staircase; and the small swinging door built into wall of the lady’s boudoir that allows a cup of tea to “appear” in her room without the service staff’s visible intervention. These last two are only as modern as the development of the corridor to separate and hide service functions in some of France’s great 18th century hôtels particuliers.
The family’s life, too, is rendered mostly opaque to the outside world. Despite all the glass, the powerful floodlights provide privacy, such that only shadowy signs of life can be discerned from the outside. The “moral exhibitionism,” then, is not one of life, per se, but of lifestyle. To be sure, the Communist-Jewish Jean Dalsace was not an introvert: he made no secret of his left-wing affiliations, as a founding member of the legally-constituted French communist party (PCF), and he was outspoken on the causes of pacifism and birth control, then banned in France (opening a birth-control clinic in a Paris suburb cost him his job as laboratory head at a major hospital). Still, privacy was crucial to the Dalsaces. I could not help but wonder, too, if some high-level discussions within the Soviet-funded and directed PCF might not have occurred in the MdV as the political climate in Europe began to shift in the mid-1930s, though this is idle speculation. Nevertheless, there is a tension, not necessarily irreconcilable, I think, between the MdV as a house of secrets and as a place of moral exhibitionism.
The MdV is a deeply contradictory house. It features modern materials assembled in the tradition of old-world craftsmanship, negotiating a way between the standardization of the German Werkbund and Le Corbusier, and the retrograde crafts tradition on display at the 1925 Paris Exposition (where the term “Art Deco” was born, and at which Chareau’s furniture appeared).
And the MdV is also a house of secrets— such that a gaggle of architects and architectural historians could spend a day in the house conjecturing and debating about some of its more mysterious details, and our extremely knowledgeable guides Andrew Ayers and Ariela Katz could discover new facets of the home for the first time. After eighty years, the MdV remains fertile ground for new research. And this—both its openness and coyness—is precisely the Maison de Verre’s charm. Thank you to the SAH, our able guides, and Mr. Rubin, for letting us in on the secret.
[1] Nicolai Ouroussoff, “The Best House in Paris,” The New York Times, August 26, 2007.
[2] Paul Nelson, “La Maison de la Rue Saint-Guillaume,” reprint of review in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (November 1933) no. 9, in Pierre Chareau, La Maison De Verre, 1928-1933: Un Objet Singulier, ed. Olivier Cinqualbre (Paris: J.-M. Place, 2001), 28.
[3] Alice Friedman, who has given some architectural credence to the notion of “glamour” in mid-century American design (see American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture, Yale 2010) was also on the tour. She would occasionally turn to me and remark, with adulation, “glam,” as new details or vistas presented themselves.
[4] Alastair Gordon, “The Court of Modernism,” wsj.com, February 25, 2011 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704364004576132362050145514.html.
[5] Kenneth Frampton, “Maison de Verre,” Perspecta 12 (January 1, 1969): 77.
[6] Walter Benjamin, “Poverty and Experience,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), 734.
[7] Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 177-192.
[8] Cited in Detlef Mertins, “The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass,” Assemblage, no. 29 (April 1, 1996): 14.
[9] Maria Gough, “Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde,” October 101 (July 1, 2002): 57 ff.
[10] See Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Perspecta 8 (January 1, 1963): 45-54.
During the SAH Study Day at the Getty Research Institute on February 2, Head of the Department of Architecture and Contemporary Art, Wim de Witt, and Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, Christopher Alexander, presented numerous materials from the GRI’s impressive special collections. USC architectural historian Kenneth Breisch, architectural documentary filmmaker Bette Cohen, and the University of Technology Sydney Architecture Dean Desley Luscombe were among the some two-dozen participants.
For the morning session, the curators assembled an array of artifacts from the GRI’s diverse architecture and design collections. Highlights included drawings from the École Polytechnique (1806), George Saunders’s drawings for the Stag Brewery in London (1807), architectural drawings for the Gare Saint-Charles railroad station in Marseille (1848), original trademark designs by Bauhaus graphic artist Carl Ernst Hinkefuss (1912-56), Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann’s interior design drawings (1924-33), Bernard Rudofsky’s watercolors of Santorini (1929), John and Donald Parkinson’s design and construction drawings for Union Station in Los Angeles (1934-39), and architect Karl Schneider’s product designs for Sears (1938-45).
The afternoon session displayed drawings and models from the archives of Modern architects including Yona Friedman, Ray Kappe, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner, and Frank Israel, as well as prints from the archive of architectural photographer Julius Shulman. The curators also presented Daniel Libeskind’s sketchbook for the Jewish Museum in Berlin (1988-92), and selections from Aldo Rossi’s notebooks on architecture (1986). Following these sessions in the Special Collections Reading Room, participants were invited to a tour and reception at the spectacular 1967 Ray Kappe House in the Rustic Canyon neighborhood of West Los Angeles.
The GRI’s recent initiative to acquire mid-century Modern archives signals a significant refocusing of The Getty’s resources. In the area of California Modernism, for example, only the Architecture and Design Collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara, now rivals The Getty’s holdings. Thankfully, most of the GRI’s recent architecture acquisitions are not “best of” archives that showcase exquisite renderings and promotional images (although those are also represented), but rather “most useful” collections that are intended to facilitate research into the idiosyncratic design processes of Modern architects. Sketchbooks, journals, and study models are therefore framed as crucial components of the collections, many of which open unprecedented research opportunities for architecture and design scholars.
Jon Yoder
Assistant Professor
Syracuse Architecture
The Structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture Study Day, September 25, 2010
I am a third year Ph.D. in architecture student at UCLA facing the critical task of defining my dissertation topic. Even at this early stage, I know I am interested in the impact of environmental control systems on the design and cultural signification of architecture. Therefore, I was thrilled to be awarded the Society of Architectural Historian’s “The Structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture” Study Day Fellowship. The intensive study day, led by Dietrich Neumann, was comprised of two components: a guided tour through Neumann’s acclaimed exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture and a series of site visits to experience Kelly’s work first hand.
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The study day began at 1:00 PM with a tour of the exhibition “The Structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture,” in which Neumann summarized the history of lighting in architecture through a series of case studies. Neumann began our tour by walking us through early examples of projects in which interiors were flooded with unrestrained light and the tops of skyscrapers beamed. Then he presented a selection of Kelly’s 300 projects to illustrate how the refined use of light created unique environments and altered the forms of buildings. Last, the tour of the exhibition concluded with Neumann walking us through a series of recently completed projects, in which the employment of light resulted in textured and/or interactive facades. After making our way through the exhibition, we understood the conditions in which Kelly formed his career and subsequently impacted architectural design.
Around 3:00 PM we took a break to enjoy coffee and the bird’s eye views of New Haven from the roof of the YSOA.
By 3:30 we inspected the placement of lights and pipes throughout the distinctive, triangulated ceiling of the Yale Art Gallery’s lobby. We learned the lighting system designed by Kelly incorporated lights, fabricated by Edison Price, that were tucked out of site in the floating tetrahedral ceiling. However, since the original lighting design did not fill the gallery spaces or light the art as hoped, the system was replaced. The current lighting scheme uses drop-down lights floating along tracks that are threaded through the ceiling hollows.
At 4:15 we walked into the Yale Center of British Art. As soon as we entered the lobby, I was stunned by the clarity of the diffused natural light that emanated from the rectangular grid of skylights. Due to these natural light fixtures, the light remained even and vibrant (but never too strong) as we walked from the foyer into the galleries filled with exquisite paintings. Kelly, in collaboration with Kahn, succeeded in using as much natural light as possible to fill the space without ever distracting the viewer from the collections with hotspots and shadows.
At 6:30 we stepped onto Philip Johnson’s forty-seven acre residence in New Canaan. Upon our arrival it was light outside. As we processed through the landscape along the circular driveway, I was astonished by the size of the property and the diversity of architectural styles. I never saw photographs of Johnson’s deconstruction meeting house, post-modern gate, library without even a path leading to it, chain-link tribute to Frank Gehry, or art and sculpture galleries. As the sun set, my attention shifted from Johnson’s experiments in style to his Glass House. The house literally transformed from being a single, open space partitioned from nature through the use of reflective glass to a series of small spaces designated by low pools of light. What is more, the glass becomes truly transparent, to the point you can see through the building without the interference of reflections, only at night (as a matter of fact, I had to circle the house numerous times before I could find a single location in which I could catch my reflection).
I failed to mention, we were sipping wine and toasting to Kelly as we were experiencing the glass house and its lighting… as if it was not enough to be there after the sun set.
Around 9:30 we arrived at the Four Seasons’ bar located within the Seagram Building in New York City. Neumann was especially enthusiastic as he described Kelly’s contribution to the design of the lobby’s lighting and materials, as well as the atmospheric effects produced within the magical restaurant. And of course we had to experience the bar firsthand, which is where the tour ended with many of the participants sipping cocktails in Kelly’s light.
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Having the privilege of participating in the study day provided me with an opportunity to both understand how other scholars are approaching questions concerning lighting systems as well as to acquire specific knowledge about the history of lighting in the United States. Moreover, since ephemeral lighting effects are no doubt best understood through direct experience. Visiting the buildings on the tour enabled me to make direct observations about responsive lighting systems in action, to better understand their placement, the amount and type of light they produce, their effects on the use of space, the aesthetic of the lighting systems, and the light’s role in the construction of the gestalt architectural image.
Amanda Delorey
We begin our final day with a trip out to Santa Fe, a corporate area that is neither pedestrian nor photographer friendly! It is quite different from the Mexico City that I am familiar with. The buildings are massive and it is clear that it is a newer development based on the predominance of contemporary structures: Teodoro González de Leon and J. Francisco Serrano designed the Torres Arcos Bosques II (2008), which is amusingly called ‘los pantalones’; Agustin Hernandez’s radical Corporativo Calakmul (1994) looks like a gigantic washing machine; side by side buildings, Aurelio Nuño’s IBM Building (1995-97) and Gustavo Echelmann and Gonzalo Gomez Palacios, Edificio Bimbo (1991-93) offer contemporary takes on the block tower.
Teodoro González de Leon and J. Francisco Serrano, Torres Arcos Bosques II (2008)
Day 6 – August 9, 2010 – Across the City
Amanda Delorey
Today we cover a lot of ground – travelling to far points in the city to see some of the hard to reach sites. We started out by stopping off at the Towers of Satellite City designed by Matias Goeritz and Luis Barragán for Mario Pani’s Cuidad Satélite, a suburb built outside of the city’s centre.
Matias Goeritz and Luis Barragán, Towers of Satellite City (1957-58)
Mexico City’s Bacardi Plant houses some attarctive modernist structures. The Bacardi Administration Building is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s sole structure in Mexico. The building is composed of a largely glass box on top of a smaller one supported by two cruciform columns and four piloti on each end. The interior has no partitions and features two stairwells leading up to the upper balconied floor. Félix Candela’s bottling plant employs the architect’s characteristic shell structure in the plant’s three hyperbolic groin vaults.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bacardi Administration Building (1958-61)
Day 5 – August 8, 2010 – Schools
Amanda Delorey
Mario Pani, Enrique del Moral and Salvador Ortega Flores, Torre de la Rectoría (1952)
For the fifth day of the tour the sites we visited were among my favourites of the trip. We walked through two school sites, the Universidad Nacional Autónomo de México (UNAM) campus and then Centro Nacional de los Artes.
Grounds at UNAM
Day 4 – August 7, 2010 – Scale
Amanda Delorey
Teotihuacán
Our fourth day offers us some of the most exciting sites of the trip – as O’Rourke put it, “This day is definitely about scale!” Our first site of the day is the ancient city of Teotihuacán, which was at its pinnacle around 400-550 CE with around 125,000 people – making it one of the largest cities in the world. Spared by the Spanish as a non-threatening site, the ruins have survived quite well and offer amazing insight into the urban planning and scale of this ancient city. Read more…
Day 3 – August 6, 2010 – Along the Paseo de la Reforma
Amanda Delorey
Carlos Obregón Santacilla, Secretaria de Salud (1925)
We begin our third day by visiting the Carlos Obregón Santacilla’s Secretaria de Salud (1925), the Ministry of Health, an early example of Mexican modernist architecture that borrows from Modern Classicism and Art Deco forms. The reforms to public healthcare after the Revolution, which brought better services to all citizens including the poor and indigenous populations, are expressed in the building: the facade and interior stained glass windows (windows designed by Diego Rivera) reveal the new inclusivity of national health care and fuse modernist architecture with Mexican imagery.
The building is organized into sections around a large courtyard, a large rounded v-shaped building runs along the site’s border, and one rectangular building sits at the open end of the larger structure. One remarkable aspect of the Secretaria de Salud is the brilliant copper-clad bridges running along the arms of the largest building, as is the abundant use of native volcanic rock in the pavilions and lush gardens in the centre courtyard. Read more…
Day 2 – August 5, 2010 – Historical Centre of the City
Amanda Delorey
We begin our second day early, boarding the tour bus and driving down Reforma for a full day of walking around the historic centre of the city. We begin in the Alameda, an area that has been largely rebuilt since it was greatly damaged in the 1985 earthquake and thus offering an interesting mix of new and old buildings. We begin to see some recurring motifs in Mexican architecture: the serpent, the jaguar and, most notably, an eagle clutching a serpent that has landed on a cactus (mythology claims that the sight of this trinity was a sign to settle and the once nomadic Aztecs chose to build their capital, Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City’s historic centre, on this site).
We first stop at Ricardo Legorreta’s Juarez Complex. Legorreta’s red and beige towers house the Superior Court of Justice of the Federal District and the Foreign Affairs Secretariat respectively. Walking into one of the complex’s more interesting interior courtyards, Plaza Juarez, I am surprised to see a large shallow pool filled with rust-coloured pyramids. The fountain, designed by artist Vincente Rojo, was part of a major revitalization project for this part of the city after the Earthquake and reveals an ongoing interest in staying connected with the city’s historical past.
Vincent Rojo, fountain for Plaza Juarez (2003)
Ricardo Legorreta, Juarez Complex (2003)
Amanda Delorey
Ricardo Legorreta, Camino Real Polanco (1968)
I will begin my recap of our fantastic week in Mexico City by introducing myself: I am a PhD student at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, UK, studying with Dr. Julian Stallabrass and my thesis topic is currently titled The People v the State: Housing Architecture in Mexico City from Modernism to Contemporary Practices. In short, I am looking at modernist social housing projects in Mexico City in comparison with contemporary projects, while taking into consideration the massive amounts of squatter settlements and self-built homes in the city. When I first heard about SAH’s study tour in Mexico City, I was excited about the prospect of an intensive week-long tour of the city led by an expert in the field and, looking back at the amount of ground we covered and the people I met along the way, I realize how truly lucky I was to have won this amazing fellowship.
Kathryn O’Rourke’s Mexico City tour, as promised, focused on modern and contemporary architecture, with a few detours along the way towards older buildings and sympathetic arts, significantly Mexican muralism, which played a vital role in the development of Mexican modernist architecture. The tour also examined the changing face of the city, characterized by massive growth and urban development, and the rich social and political history of the country’s capital. The dualistic nature of Mexican modernism was addressed by contrasting buildings designed to facilitate societal transformation with those tending to eschew that role. We visited well-known sites as well as structures that were new to me, which was quite exciting, and sites that would have been very difficult to get into alone. The tour offered an excellent first-hand introduction to Mexican modern and contemporary architecture for the novice and enthusiast alike. Read more…
