Radical Functionalism

A Social Architecture for Mexico

Luis E. Carranza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032003542
• eBook ISBN: 9781000510881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Radical Functionalism: A Social Architecture for Mexico provides a complex and nuanced understanding of the functionalist architecture developed in Mexico during the 1930s. It carefully re-reads the central texts and projects of its main advocates to show how their theories responded to the socially and culturally charged Mexican context. These, such as architects Juan Legarreta, Juan O'Gorman, the Union of Socialist Architects, and Manuel Amábilis, were part of broader explorations to develop a modern, national architecture intended to address the needs of the Mexican working classes.

Through their refunctioning of functionalism, these radical thinkers showed how architecture could stand at the precipice of Mexico's impending modernization and respond to its impending changes. The book examines their engagement and negotiation with foreign influences, issues of gender and class, and the separation between art and architecture. Functionalist practices are presented as contradictory and experimental, as challenging the role of architecture in the transformation of society, and as intimately linked to art and local culture in the development of new forms of architecture for Mexico, including the "vernacularization" of functionalism itself.

Uniquely including translations of two manifesto-like texts by O'Gorman expressing the polemical nature of their investigations, Radical Functionalism: A Social Architecture for Mexico will be a useful reference for scholars, researchers and students interested in the history of architectural movements.

1 Building revolution Mexican architecture in the first part of the twentieth century

DOI: 10.4324/9781003173793-2

After fractious attempts at establishing a government following the end of Porfirio Díaz’s 30-year dictatorship, a period of assessment regarding the state of the Mexican people began with the Mexican revolution’s aftermath. Diaz, removed from power by the revolution of 1910–1920, advocated for and sponsored an architecture intended to express Mexico’s modernization by relying on European models based, primarily, on Beaux-Arts aesthetics. With the end of the revolutionary activities, architects began to search in earnest for an appropriate architecture to express the character of the Mexican people, their culture, and their traditions; communicate to them in an architectural, stylistic, and visual language that they could understand; and solve the social problems caused by the neglect of a regime more interested in courting foreign investment than building adequate housing or educating its people.

Elected in 1876, Díaz established a government modeled on European ideals and philosophies, mainly Positivism, in its quest for science and progress. In addition, his government encouraged the modernization of the country through the introduction of modern infrastructure, the importation of new technologies, and industrial development. In its turn away from the strictures established during the colonial period, Mexico turned toward neoclassical architecture because of its association with progress, order, and enlightenment characteristic of the great modern European civilizations. The Academia de San Carlos, the premier institution for the education of art and architecture in Mexico, followed European models of teaching characteristic of the French École des Beaux-Arts and brought to Mexico teachers, styles, and compositional systems from abroad. The focus on Paris, as the so-called capital of the nineteenth century, increased as interest in French academic culture and influence grew. These led the Díaz regime to promote a particular development of Mexico City and other large cities in the country through the introduction of new programs and heightened stylistic designs modeled on Europe and, in most cases, designed by foreign architects with the assistance of local ones. Emblematic of these are the Communications Building (Silvio Contri, 1906), the Post Office Building (Adamo Boari, 1902), the Palace of Fine Arts (Boari, beg. in 1904), and the unfinished Legislative Palace (Emile Benard, beg. in 1902). Besides these buildings influenced by European architecture, there were official experimentations with pre-Hispanic architecture that was modified and modernized according to Beaux-Arts styles and techniques. Works such as Mexican Pavilion for the Universal Exposition (Paris, 1889) were part of a broader search for a “national” architectural style.

With the end of the revolution, we see the birth of what could be considered an avant-gardist project for Mexico that sought to integrate art into the praxis of life, that is, to transform art to become “useful” to the reformation of society. Foundational to this was the role of public education under the direction of José Vasconcelos. Appointed by President Álvaro Obregón, the first president of Mexico following the revolution, Vasconcelos was tasked with developing an educational program for a population that had been systemically ignored by the Díaz regime (which had an illiteracy rate of 79% at the beginning of the revolution).¹ Vasconcelos was instrumental in promoting the use of muralism and architecture to serve the new educational environment and, because of this, he can be considered Mexico’s de facto father of plastic integration—the introduction of plastic arts into architecture. For him, the use of traditional colonial architecture and public murals painted in a realistic style was necessary to communicate to the majority of the population through a visual language they already knew (from over 300 years of contact with it) and with a painterly system intended not only to encourage class and race consciousness but also serve to enact a transcendental aesthetic experience.

Vasconcelos’ ideas were based on models established in colonial art, architecture, and life. From these, he derived the sense that the new environments for Mexico should reflect the grandeur of earlier epochs, that they should use an artistic and architectural language that represented Mexico’s social character and values in direct ways, and that they physically materialize—as a synthesis or syncretism of Spanish and local styles—the miscegenation characteristic of the racial mixture during the colonial period. In one important passage, Vasconcelos romanticized the character of that interaction and effect in this way:

[The missionary] would arrive at the desert and … in the middle of the desert he decided to build great walls … powerful works, a construction that was rooted … In the evening or after nightfall, the mission, which had been a beehive of manual labor, would transform into a school: a school of religion, a school of language, a school of art—since drawing, music, and singing were taught. We can only imagine what those schools of labor and art were like.²

As in the colonial example, Vasconcelos’ ultimate desire was to create a total work of art where the distinction between art and life would be erased through the architectural, decorative, and educational program of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) [Department of Public Education].

The architectural agenda for the SEP, therefore, embodied in a modern way the colonial spirit: it was built with modern materials such as reinforced concrete, had a subdued ornamental agenda in most cases, and contained modern programs such as libraries and radio stations. Because of its inability to fully communicate the values and ideals that Vasconcelos aspired to or thought necessary to effectively educate the user, as noted above, the architecture was supplemented with plastic arts in order to give the ideas legible manifestation and become didactic. These included the expression and construction of local and national identities through depictions of regional flora, fauna, cultural traditions, events, traditional work, and depictions of the territory. The painter Diego Rivera was one of the artists working for Vasconcelos who became responsible for most of the murals at the headquarters of the SEP. Having traveled with Vasconcelos throughout Mexico, Rivera’s work portrayed typical dresses and activities of the different zones of Mexico as well as arts and folk traditions that were disappearing because of modernization. His work also showed the condition of the working class, the injustices against it, and, in later murals, themes of class struggle and world revolution.

The radicality of the muralists’ work was articulated in their 1923 manifesto which highlighted the importance of art to the revolutionary project and proposed an art that was collective, political, and critical of the bourgeoisie.³ These artists sought to develop a popular art, reflective of the tradition of the native Indian population. In the end, they advocated for their work to be monumental, accessible to all, and useful as ideological propaganda for the people. As the historian Mary Coffey notes, muralism was central to the formation of the post-revolutionary state, identity, and rule. Its importance and canonization by the state, despite its oppositional and critical vocation, reflected the radical expression of patriotism and national becoming. The state would ultimately legitimize and homogenize the artists’ interest in participating.⁴

Occurring simultaneously with the Mexican muralist movement was the development of the avant-gardist Estridentista [stridentist] movement. Centered more in expressing Mexico’s emerging modernization and influenced by international artistic currents, the Estridentistas worked to develop a literary and visual aesthetic that reflected a multiplicity of viewpoints, the importance of new audiences (such as the working-class masses) and communicative media, and reflecting perceptual shifts enabled by modernization’s new forms, materials, and space. Headed by the poet Manuel Maples Arce, the group primarily expressed its ideas through printed texts (the first manifesto, Actual 1 (1921), was a printed broadsheet pasted throughout public walls in Mexico City), books, and woodcuts and engravings. The latter were used to represent the symbols of modernity—factories, modern metropolises, new technologies—as well as to radicalize traditional forms by placing them under a modernizing lens. The visual imagery created by its artists—Ramón Alva de la Canal, Leopoldo Méndez, and others—served a similar communicative role to that of the muralists as it was mostly realistic. By utilizing woodcuts, they relied on a graphic technique that was historically associated with political and social criticism.⁵

Other searches for appropriate architectural responses would address the historical architecture of Mexico before the colony. As part of this search for a national style, pre-Hispanic architecture was perceived as a viable architectural style because it was seen as uncorrupted by European or North American culture, as something that could be seen as a true expression of the place and native people and, in addition, as an architectural style whose forms and ornaments could be understood by the largely indigenous population. The problem architects faced, however, was of how to adapt pre-Hispanic architecture to address modern needs, typologies, and aesthetic tastes. Some architects found the abstraction characteristic of pre-Hispanic ornaments to express new aesthetic forms in the same way that cubist painters referenced African masks in their works. Others understood that one could develop an architecture influenced—without copying—the formal and spatial principles behind the early architecture.⁶ Through this, in the words of Reyner Banham, architects could turn to the past in their “simultaneous quest for pure modernity and also ancient certainty.”⁷ Manuel Amábilis’ Mexican Pavilion for the 1929 Iberoamerican Exposition in Seville, Spain, expressed both by developing a structure organized by diagonal symmetry, which he claimed was central to Mayan architecture, and used ornaments typical of Mayan architecture. In addition, its interiors were decorated with murals and stained-glass windows inspired by the work of Diego Rivera.

Functionalist architecture was also part of the searches for a Mexican architecture after the Revolution. Its advocates argued that it was an architecture that solved the needs of the population in a direct, efficient way through the economical use of materials and the removal of ornamentation. The beginnings of functionalism in Mexico can be traced, again, to formal and stylistic experiments to find an appropriate modern architecture. Architects such as Carlos Obregón Santacilia and José Villagrán can be seen as transitional figures in this movement through their adaptation of colonial architecture to modern sensibilities and programs. Both architects were part of Vasconcelos’ neocolonial building campaign—Obregón Santacilia built the Centro Escolar Benito Juárez (1923–1925) and Villagrán the National Stadium (1923)—that, in the process, were finding ways of modernizing its construction with reinforced concrete. They also worked together in the development of an apartment building in 1925 that Diego Rivera would highlight as an important and transitional expression of a new modern Mexican architecture. In addition, they were also teachers at the school of architecture of the National University and employers of the young generation of architects, such as Juan O’Gorman, Enrique Yáñez, and others, who would take up the banner of functionalist architecture at the beginning of the 1930s.

Villagrán has been credited historiographically as the father of functionalism in Mexico. He was an early advocate for the importance and connection between architecture and the well-being of society through his design of the Granja Sanitaria (1925), a facility intended for the development of vaccines. This complex showed that through a new hygienic architecture the state could control the unwholesome conditions present in the country. For this to become a reality, the architecture and organization of the complex designed by Villagrán closely followed its programmatic and functional needs. Its hygienic qualities would come through simple, unadorned volumes with large openings and built primarily with reinforced concrete which would make it fire- and mold-proof.

The Mexican cement industry would be a big advocate of this modern architecture through its advertising and, most importantly, through the publications it sponsored to promote the use of cement. The magazines Cemento (1925–1929) and Tolteca (1928–1932), primarily under the marketing direction of Federico Sánchez Fogarty, tied concrete-built modern architecture to the revolutionary impulses and stylistic searches, to the interest in hygiene and durability, and to principles of economy. Through these publications as well as competitions, modernist architecture was popularized with the working class, as inexpensive and easy to build, and with the bourgeoisie because of its associations with the European and North American international style architecture. For the American critic, Beach Riley, this new architecture was being built in the wealthier suburbs of Mexico where it had a “tendency towards stylization, towards the decorative use of cement, towards the arbitrary manipulation of planes and surfaces not always based on the logic of use.”⁸ Developers, such as the architect Luis Barragán, found it to be more profitable because its simplicity led to less investment and maximum profits. It was this ideological appropriation of the social elements at the center of modern architecture and functionalism that, in the eyes of the young and radical socialist-minded architects, devalued it as corrupt and socially bankrupt.

Another important source promoting modern architecture in Mexico was the arrival of émigrés and exiles that settled there. With the ascension of the Nazis to power in 1933, the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and the uncertainties caused by the Second World War, many architects and their families arrived in Mexico because they were being banished, persecuted, and/or forced to flee their native countries for personal and political reasons. Mexico became an important destination for them given the social appeal that the Mexican revolution still held, its lenient and inviting emigration policies, and its strong anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist movements. Among the émigrés were Hannes Meyer, the radical functionalist architect who had served as director of the Bauhaus (1928–1930); Max Cetto, a modern architect who had played a role in Ernst May’s building team in Frankfurt and had initially emigrated to the United States to work with Frank Lloyd Wright; and Félix Candela, who emigrated from Spain and developed structural shell structures in reinforced concrete.

All in all, the state was the biggest sponsor of modern architecture following the revolution. Not only is this clearly seen with the building program put in place by Vasconcelos for the SEP but also by others who followed his path, including the Minister of Education Narciso Bassols (1931–1934) who would build numerous functionalist schools during his tenure. This trend of state-sponsored building would continue into the 1950s with the construction of the National University (UNAM) in the Southern part of Mexico City.

The most common trend found in the architecture sponsored by the state was monumentality: an architecture that responded in different ways, styles, and formal expressions to the experiments enacted following the revolution and, in particular, the importance of developing a communicative architectural language repl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Illustration credits
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: polemical functionalism: functional art or artistic building
• 1 Building revolution: Mexican architecture in the first part of the twentieth century
• 2 Functionalism and social progress
• 3 Alter(n)ative functionalism
• 4 Radical functionalism
• 5 Between art and technology
• 6 Place, history, and (local) culture
• 7 Representation and reception
• 8 The city in the functionalist imagination
• Epilogue: organic functionalism
• Translations
• Index