Mexican Designers Hang On to the Old, Embrace the New

When Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta painted one wall a vivid purple in a new shopping center he designed in Tustin, the city’s mayor protested so vehemently that Legorreta was forced to recolor the wall a more modest ocher.

“The incident taught me something about the profound differences that lie beneath the surface similarities Southern California shares with my homeland,” Legorreta said. “Though the climate and topography are similar, and also much of the cultural heritage, California society is simultaneously more confident and less bold than ours, and this difference is reflected in the architecture.”

The weight of architectural history bears down very differently upon the two cultures, he noted.

While Southern California’s design traditions are sparse and relatively recent--the oldest is the style of the missions introduced in the 18th Century--Mexico has a 4,000-year heritage that includes such major architectural icons as the Mayan temples of Chichen Itza and the Baroque churches built by the Castillian conquerors.

Still, both design cultures want to be modern. In Los Angeles, this urge to modernity expresses itself as a wish to be on the cutting edge of innovation. In Mexico, it underlies a continuing national struggle to become a full member of the developed world.

“In Mexico we build for the pleasure of building, with passion and authenticity,” Legorreta said. “The question is, how may we be both Mexican and modern?”

That was a critical issue addressed when Legorreta and other important figures in Mexican architecture gathered on Jan. 26 for a daylong symposium on contemporary Mexican architecture at the Pacific Design Center. Co-sponsored by the Friends of Mexico Foundation, the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the USC School of Architecture, the symposium featured seven prominent designers representing three generations of contemporary Mexican architecture.

Mexico’s older architectural generation was represented by Legorreta and Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon. Enrique Norten was the youngest of the group. In between were Bosco Gutierrez Cortina, Felix Sanchez Aguilar, David Munoz Suarez and Augustin Hernandez.

All the architects showed work that confronted Legorreta’s question on how to be both Mexican and modern.

“We seek security and solidity in a changing and stressful world,” said Gutierrez Cortina. “We require an art distilled through time that embodies spiritual and emotional values.”

Strongly influenced by the Spanish-mission tradition of simple wall planes and intense colors, Gutierrez Cortina’s architecture also is influenced by the severe sensibility of Luis Barragan, the godfather of Mexican architectural modernism whose powerful shadow falls upon the shoulders of every Mexican designer.

Barragan, a student of Le Corbusier who first adapted the International Style to the Mexican sensibility, built several houses in the El Pedregal district of Mexico City. Their bold geometries were set off by sumptuous textures and primary colors. “I believe in an emotional architecture,” he wrote, “one which offers the user a message of beauty and feeling.” Emphasizing one of the main themes of Mexican modernism, he insisted: “Any work of architecture that does not express serenity is a mistake. That is why it has been an error to replace the protection of walls with today’s intemperate use of enormous glass windows.”

The “protection of walls”--powerful plain surfaces punctured by deep-set windows or massive doorways--marks the style of many modern Mexican buildings.

Gonzalez de Leon’s Mayan Archeological Complex in Villahermosa, Tabasco Province, features a long black wall slit by a triangular archway painted blood red. The archway mimics the angled profile of the Temple of Chichen Itza, which is seen in the distance, down the length of a corridor designed to symbolize a long journey, burrowing deep into the Yucatan’s past.

In his government center for the state of Chiapas Munoz, Suarez superimposed three triangular shapes presenting sharp, blank facades to the surrounding semi-desert landscape. The Chiapas design, mirroring the monumentality of pre-Columbian buildings, reflects the sense of cultural and physical siege in a hostile yet compelling environment that haunts much of Mexico’s modern architecture.

As a mannerism, “monumentality”--buildings of large-scale with many blank surfaces--troubles many Mexican designs. It threatens the tranquillity of the famous 1953 University City library by Juan O’Gorman. Its entire windowless facade is covered on all four sides by an overpowering Aztec-style mosaic mural.

Monumentality overwhelms the brutally geometric house for Hernandez Ramirez, resembling a concrete spaceship, designed by Augustin Hernandez.

Mexicans inherited the tendency toward the monumental from their pre-Columbian and Latino traditions, Legorreta said, remarking: “We continue that propensity nowadays to bolster our uncertain cultural identity on the edge of the developed world. Confident California, by contrast, can afford a less assertive architecture.”

Monumentality is difficult to reconcile with a democracy’s architecture. It takes great skill and a subtle sensibility to achieve a powerful simplicity that is also humanely scaled. Only Legorreta and Barragan, his mentor and sometime partner, have absorbed the traditions and transformed them with fresh, fully realized styles of their own.

Many younger Mexican architects, however, avoid tradition’s traps altogether. The sleek and elegant late-modernism of TEN & Associates, led by Enrique Norten, is exemplified in the high-tech design for the Illumination Center, a lighting showroom in Mexico City.

The center, which shows the influence of avant-garde Los Angeles architects, particularly Morphosis, is an exercise in abstract image-making that could be at home in any metropolis.

“We believe in a modernism different from that of our grandfathers,” Norten said. “Abstraction has changed our perception of the world, challenging us to create new expressions for the everyday life of a fragmented and discontinuous culture.”

In other words, Mexicans are as up-to-date as anybody in their delight and confusion at the complexities of the contemporary urban scene.

And as schizoid.

“We endure multiple schizophrenias,” Legorreta said. “There is the schizophrenia of pre- and post-Conquest traditions. There is the schizophrenia of functioning in a Third World society struggling to join the First World. And there is a split between what Barragan called ‘the architecture of the poor’ and the elitist urge to create superb personal architectural objects, usually for the privileged.”

The drastic 1985 temblor that shook Mexico City and shattered many of its buildings also forced many architects to rethink their responsibilities.

“In 19 seconds, the modern idea of Mexico fell down,” said Sanchez Aguilar. “It was a real shocker that made us look again at the desperate need for an architecture of survival, rather than one dominated by personal mannerisms.”

After the quake, Sanchez Aguilar, like many of his colleagues, grew deeply concerned with providing affordable housing for Mexico City’s displaced working class. Designing within bedrock budgets, tangled by red tape, they achieved several remarkable multiple-housing complexes that manage to be fine urban architecture with a strong sense of place.

“In the end, Mexicans are very Mexican,” Legorreta said. “When we work out of our country, we have to think carefully how to adapt our styles without losing our souls.”

Legorreta has built several designs in the United States, including a house for actor Ricardo Montalban in the Hollywood Hills, a Children’s Museum in San Jose and the IBM National Marketing and Support Center in Solana, outside Fort Worth, Tex. He also is a member of the urban design team that is preparing the master plan for the massive Playa Vista project next to Marina del Rey.

“Is ‘passion and authenticity’ portable?” Legorreta asked rhetorically, furrowing his brow. “That is the question every architect who works in a number of different countries, as so many now do, must ask. . . .

“If our architecture--which is so unmistakably Mexican--can travel without spoiling, I feel we’re truly on the road to a valid culture for our global village.”