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Thursday, April 19, 2012 - 5:30pm
Bob Smith Auditorium - Meadows Museum
In 1957, German artist Mathias Goeritz and Mexican architect Luis Barragán designed the Torres de Ciudad Satélite (Towers of Satellite City) to serve as the advertising logo and place-marker for Mexico’s first planned “bedroom community.” Over 100 feet tall and constructed from reinforced concrete, the hollow, wedge-shaped Towers exemplify Goeritz’s concept of Arquitectura Emocional (Emotional Architecture). This antirationalist, anti-realist approach to the integration of abstract art and modernist architecture sought to channel the awe-inspiring properties of pre-Columbian and Gothic monuments into modern constructions.
By 1960, Goeritz had transferred the permanent, monumental aims of Emotional Architecture to a portable and mutable assemblage sculpture, titled Pyramides mexicaines (Mexican Pyramids), which he deployed in New York and Paris in neo-avant-garde contexts. In positioning the Towers of Satellite City and Mexican Pyramids as the dialectical poles of Goeritz’s articulation of Emotional Architecture, this lecture locates the emergence of the “new art” in Mexico not in a rupture between realist and abstract painters, as previous histories have claimed, but at the nexus of sculpture, architecture, and the circulation of these forms in exhibitions and the mass media.
Contact:
214-768-2698
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