The Houses of Guadalajara. Ghosts of Modernity / Ghosts of the Past

This book studies the origins and late evolution of modern Mexican architecture through a series of houses built by two generations of architects during the 1920s and 1980s in Guadalajara. In so doing, it proposes an alternative history of Mexican architecture—positioning Guadalajara as a counterpoint to Mexico City, and putting forward a series of works and ideas that suggest a new relationship between innovation and tradition.

This is also, inevitably, a book about Luis Barragán and the long shadow he cast over Mexican architecture. It explores his early and little—known work as part of a generation of architect–engineers known as the Escuela Tapatía (the Guadalajara School), which in the 1920s developed an abstract and stylized reinterpretation of the regional architecture of Jalisco. Even less well known is the generation of architects who began their careers in Guadalajara in the early 1980s. This group took the work of Barragán and his colleagues from the 1920s as the starting point for its own production, resulting in an “echo of an echo”—a reinterpretation through time of an increasingly distant and abstracted original.