Living the Noom, Mexico,

Sanzpont Arquitectura In collaboration with Pedrajo+Pedrajo Arquitectos

Happy Birthday, Juan García Esquivel (1918-2002)

The cover of Other Worlds, Other Sounds says it all–like the woman in red dancing on a moonscape, this 1958 long-player was all about fantasy. And Esquivel, the legendary Mexican conductor-arranger and forefather to the entire lounge and exotica renaissance of the mid ‘90s, wasn’t afraid to fantasize about his instrumentation nor the newfangled invention known as “stereophonic sound.” Essentially, this is an entire album of standards played in a beguine tempo with a percussive orchestra and a humming chorus, but–under Esquivel’s knob-twiddling fingers–the disc turns into magic. Voices ring back and forth between speakers, horns explode out of nowhere, and piano sounds cascade out of the stereo. This is what hi-fi was all about, and–though it was merely a precursor to the composer’s even stranger sonic experiments–it’s also one of his most cohesive albums. [Jason Verlinde]

Happy Birthday, Juan García Esquivel (1918-2002)

Esquivel  -  b. Jan. 20, 1918

The Night of the Radishes (Noche de rábanos) is celebrated every year on December 23. It began in 1897 in the main plaza of Oaxaca City, Mexico. Although it lasts only a few hours, it attracts thousands of people to this plaza each year. The event consists of an exhibition of sculptures made from a type of large red radish which can weigh up to 6.6 lb and attain lengths up to 20 in. These radishes are especially grown for this event, left in the ground for months after the normal harvests to let them attain their giant size and unusual shapes. The radish is not native to Oaxaca. The Spanish brought them to Oaxaca in the 16th century, and Spanish monks encouraged the locals to grow them. The Night of the Radishes was created in order to promote the new vegetable. [O'Blivion]

José Clemente Orozco, who was born on this day in 1883, is considered one of “los tres grandes” of modern Mexican mural painting, along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Orozco was a highly political artist who was sensitive to the suffering of marginalized groups of society.

“Mural Detail (Grief),” 1929, by José Clemente Orozco 

Mexico, huichole people, Google search

Esther Williams poses with Mexican comedian, Cantinflas, while in Mexico during the filming of Fiesta, 1946

Fantomas 1960s comic / Mexico

Empire Of The Sun - We Are The People

Las Pozas  -  Mexico

Las Pozas

Spring has arrived! Our research this week is led by the seasonal aspiration to step outside. How does a landscape affect the experience of a structure? How does a structure alter the landscape? We wonder. In so doing, we look to designers who have lived and worked at the meeting point of the outside and the in, of the natural and the fabricated. We turn to the surrealist eccentric, Edward James (1907-1984).

Born with an aristocratic pedigree, James used his inheritance to support a burgeoning interest in the obscure forms of art and architecture: the surreal. James was a poet rejecting the rigidity of the upper class, he was a muse to and supporter of Magritte and Dali, and he was ultimately an inventor of fantastical environments. During the last two decades of his life, he left England and brought this consciousness with him to an eighty-acre site in Xilitla, Mexico. He called it Las Pozas (the Pools).

The structures he commissioned there seem to have been found at the site, that’s part of their success. They emerge organically, entangled within the dense, ripe jungle, as if to beg the visitor to consider whether they’d always been there. That’s their surreal nature. If a champion should emerge from the collision between the concrete and jungle, the champion here seems to be the latter. The canopy of leaves envelopes each structure; the concrete becomes an extension for the vines and the trees to spread. Perhaps it is this submission to the land that’s most beautiful about Las Pozas, the structures are large and striking on their own, but they just as readily serve as a platform for nature to expand.

We’re taking inspiration from this to celebrate the outside world through design. Here are the images we love most.

Edward James

From Ten Speed Press and Ron Cooper, Finding Mezcal: A Journey Into the Liquid Soul of Mexico.

IN RESIDENCE: CASA GILARDI (2016)

A really nice video tour from Nowness, exploring the last project Mexican icon Luis Barragán completed before he died. (Image via pinterest)

Sombreros from Photographs of Mexico, 1933, by Anton Bruehl.  Ask a librarian to see anything in our special collections!

Pabellón de México en la Trienal de Milán (Terrazas y Wyman, 1968)

Giant Baby Mural Placed at U.S.-Mexico Border Wall

Tower of human skulls in Mexico casts new light on Aztecs

A tower of human skulls unearthed beneath the heart of Mexico City has raised new questions about the culture of sacrifice in the Aztec Empire after crania of women and children surfaced among the hundreds embedded in the forbidding structure.

Archaeologists have found more than 650 skulls caked in lime and thousands of fragments in the cylindrical edifice near the site of the Templo Mayor, one of the main temples in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which later became Mexico City.

The tower is believed to form part of the Huey Tzompantli, a massive array of skulls that struck fear into the Spanish conquistadores when they captured the city under Hernan Cortes, and mentioned the structure in contemporary accounts. Read more.