Juan O’Gorman I would like to thank Junta de Andalucía and Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the UNAM for their institutional support. I am also grateful for the commentaries and help of my colleagues: Enrique X. de Anda, Ernesto Alva, Luis E. Carranza, Alfonso Garduño, Xavier Guzmán, Victor Jiménez, Juan José Lahuerta, José Ramón Moreno Pérez, Victor Pérez Escolano, Juan Luis Rodríguez, Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, Hashim Sarkis, Eduardo Subirats and Alejandro Von Wareber.
Necrophilia, the attraction to that which is dead, decadent, lifeless and purely mechanical, is growing in all parts of our industrial and cybernetic society … The fascist shout of ‘Long live Death!’ is in danger of becoming the secret beginning of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine will become the real meaning of progress and Man will become a mere appendage of the machine.1 erich fromm , quoted by juan o’gorman ¡Viva la Vida! (Long live Life!) frida kahlo
Sixty years after its completion, the chimerical cave house of an architect and painter Juan O’Gorman remains to a large degree a difficult enigma to untangle. The contrast between the author’s organic period – mainly represented by this house – and his Functionalist period – typified or embodied by his celebrated houses for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (1931–2) [figure 1] – has puzzled critics and architects, producing an enormous controversy around his work. 2 Perhaps the comment by the influential Israel Katzman, who wrote that O’Gorman was the Mexican architect ‘whose theory contradicted the most his constructed work’, 3 is the one which carries the most weight when interpreting the second stage of the architect’s career. Among his contemporaries, only Max Cetto seems to have shown a true appreciation for it, understanding O’Gorman’s activities as the
1 — Erich Fromm, ‘Los instintos y las pasiones humanas’ (Human insticts and passions), quoted in Juan O’Gorman, ‘Algunas consideraciones generales sobre el fenómeno del arte’ (Some general considerations about the phenomenon of art), in Ida Rodríguez Pamprolini (ed.), La palabra de Juan O’Gorman: selección de textos (Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1983), 50. Unless otherwise indicated, all the translations from Spanish are mine. 2 — To understand the period that O’Gorman himself defines as Functionalist, it is necessary to consult his paradigmatic text ‘El arte estético y el arte útil’ (Aesthetic Art and Useful Art), which in its time was widely celebrated by Diego Rivera. He himself defines his Functionalism as ‘maximum efficiency with minimum effort’. For O’Gorman at that time, the only solution to the Mexican socio-economic problem was to ‘replace architecture with a
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