Guadalajara Modernism: A Lesser-Known Strand of Mexican Architecture

Key facts

• Guadalajara modernism is a lesser-known but significant strand of 20th-century Mexican architecture.
• Luis Barragán was born in Guadalajara in 1902 and began his career there before moving to Mexico City in 1936.
• The Escuela Tapatía de Arquitectura was formed in the 1920s–1930s by Luis Barragán, Ignacio Díaz Morales, Pedro Castellanos Lambley, and Rafael Urzúa.
• Barragán's early Guadalajara work includes over a dozen private homes in Colonia Americana, such as Casa González Luna (1928) and Casa Cristo (1929).
• Pedro Castellanos Lambley's Casa Quiñones (1930) is considered the first modernist house in Guadalajara.
• José Clemente Orozco painted 57 murals in 1938 inside the Hospicio Cabañas, now a UNESCO World Heritage site.
• Ignacio Díaz Morales founded the architecture department at ITESO in 1948, based on Bauhaus ideas, with Mathias Goeritz and Erich Coufal among the faculty.
• Félix Aceves Ortega and Alejandro Zohn Rosenthal were key brutalist architects in Guadalajara; Zohn Rosenthal's Mercado Libertad was built between 1953 and 1958.