Mexican Modernist Architecture

Mexican modernist architecture emerged in the decades following the Mexican Revolution, as architects blended functionalism, expressionism and other international schools with distinctly Mexican stylistic elements and European building techniques. Luis Barragan became its most influential figure, and the houses he designed during the 1950s and 1960s reconciled the modernist lessons of Le Corbusier with the Spanish colonial tradition, producing what critics have called a completely original modernist architecture uniquely adapted to its environment. The movement placed particular emphasis on integrating art directly into architecture, most ambitiously at the Ciudad Universitaria complex begun in 1950, which incorporated murals by Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros into its buildings. Other major contributions included Felix Candela's thin shelled concrete churches, Mario Pani's large housing projects, and Pedro Ramirez Vazquez's Anthropology Museum, together demonstrating the era's wide experimentation with modern materials and forms.