The Jungapeo cemetery in Mexico designed by Mijares

Several Latin American architects have been successful in combining traditional and regional building technologies with systems and approaches that are contemporary and associated with professional practices.

The buildings of Severiano Porto in Manaus, Brazil, are an excellent example of the use of local materials and labour, and the integration of traditional and advanced technologies in the midst of the Amazon jungle.

In a difficult climate, they provide living conditions which do not depend on sophisticated systems or expensive materials. Another example is found in the work of Edward Rojas, whose buildings, mainly in the Chiloe archipelago in the south of Chile, show the influence of nature.

Rojas has succeeded in preserving local aesthetic and structural systems. Rojas’s work, while avoiding the trap of provinciality, has allowed other architects to value the elements constituting their local identity and defend them as integral cultural components.

Today, when designers are trying to get their buildings rated for energy efficiency, the works of these two south Americans show buildings inspired by traditional methods were energy-efficient.

Carlos Mijares of Mexico has become part of this special group of architects. Born in Mexico City in 1930, he started professional practice in mid-1950s, during the ‘Mexican miracle’ of great urban, economic and population growth.

In 1955, he became a university professor of history of architecture. His courses, recognised by both his students and colleagues as unorthodox in their way of perceiving and transmitting architecture, were not limited to classical and historical references, but placed side by side with literature, music and gastronomy.

His visits to the US and Europe in the sixties brought him in direct contact with contemporary work and with the historical examples of medieval Europe. He was particularly influenced by the works of John Utzon, the architect of Sydney Opera House. Many years later, he would continue to admire Utzon’s appreciation and understanding, according to his own ideals of pre-Hispanic architecture and urban way of life. He would also continue to admire Utzon’s use of space and scale.

The economic and social history of Mexico during the 1970s and 1980s is a mixture of illusion and frustration. A great economic expansion was manifested in gigantic investments and huge buildings, and the appearance of an architecture, which was not the most appropriate for the country. There was a tendency to extravagance, using high-cost technologies and monumentalism.

It ended towards 1985 with the fading of the dream of being an oil-rich country. Inflation, external debt, public investment limitations, the private sector’s fear of undertaking new projects all led to a paralysis of building activities, only halted by the earthquake disaster of 1985, which made large housing and reconstruction projects necessary. It was during these decades of crisis that Mijares’s professional career developed.

The most outstanding feature of Mijares’s work is his use of materials, whether bricks, stone or concrete. The way in which he carries these materials to unimagined extremes, and his constant exploration of new applications and expressions for the materials themselves is extraordinary.

(To be continued)

(The author is an architect and urban designer)