ABSTRACT

In the history of the Mexican modern, Juan O’Gorman (1905–82) is remembered as the architect who built some of the country’s first functionalist projects, along with his mentor Jose Villagran Garcia, as well as creating the iconic murals of the University Library in Mexico City (UNAM). In fact, the life work of Juan O’Gorman and his restless and rebellious spirit can be ‘justified’ by a schism between painting and architecture, which for him is absolute during the interwar period, where he understands architecture mainly as engineering work committed to providing primarily for the basic needs of the people. Murals equally marked the emergence of a characteristically local expression of modernity in Brazil, in one of the country’s happiest moments of architectural history. In this instance, it was a wall clad with azulejos, the traditional Portuguese ceramic, tin-glazed tiles, created originally by the Arabs to imitate Byzantine and Roman mosaics.