Vassallo, Jesús: Ghosts of Modernity / Ghosts of the Past

This book retells the origins and evolution of Mexican Modern architecture through the unsung stories of two generations of architects who practiced in Guadalajara in the 1930s and 1990s While some people are aware that Luis Barragán started his career in Guadalajara, working on a style much different from his better-known work in Mexico City, it is only very few who know that he actually practiced briefly as part of a generation of architects known as the Escuela Tapatia (Guadalajara School). This group, guided by Barragán‘s early interest in Southern European architecture, deployed a cohesive architecture that embodied an abstracted and stylized reinterpretation of the vernacular architecture of the state of Jalisco. Even more anonymous is the generation of architects who initially studied under the shadow of Barragán‘s generation and eventually reached maturity during the 1980s and 90s deploying an architecture that was itself and echo of an echo, a further interpretation and abstraction of a distant original, seen through the lens of the work produced during the 1930s. Through selected projects and critical texts, this book tells for the first time the stories of these two generations which mirror each other while proposing that architecture is in and of itself always a mirror, if only distorted and abstracted, of something that came before.