Felix Candela From Mexico City to Chicago. Rise and Fall of Experimentation in Concrete

Candela’s move from Mexico City to Chicago, despite his professional success, is rarely discussed. This book investigates the political and economic conditions that influenced his work and motivated his departure, offering a more nuanced understanding of his contributions to mid-20th-century architecture. Unlike existing literature, it examines Candela’s work in both Mexico and the US, highlighting his role as an architect who shaped new architectural spaces with smooth curves and rough concrete.

Combining historical research, oral histories, contemporary theories, construction photographs, essays, interviews, and translations of Candela’s writings, this book reveals his unique position in Latin-American and US architecture. It explores the conditions in both countries, such as Mexico’s low wages and cheap timber fostering concrete experimentation in the 1950s, and how the 1968 student demonstrations in Mexico City and Chicago’s architectural legacy influenced Candela.

The book also delves into Candela’s “Chicago period” through essays based on archival research and interviews with his colleagues and students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, presenting new findings to illuminate the complex factors shaping his work during the 1970s.

With Contributions of

Alexander Eisenschmidt, Juan Ignacio del Cueto, Nader Tehrani, Kathryn O’Rourke, Jonathan Miller, George F. Flaherty, Stuart Cohen, Geoff Goldberg, Ero Aggelopoulou-Amiridis, William Baker, Bob Bruegmann, Elisa María Teresa Drago Quaglia, Stanley Tigerman (in the order of appearance).