The Houses of Guadalajara by Jesús Vassallo and Jorge Alberto Muñoz studies the origins and late evolution of modern Mexican architecture through houses built by two generations of architects in Guadalajara — a city consistently overlooked in favour of Mexico City, whose architectural history proposes a genuinely different account of Mexican modernism.
About This Book
This is, among other things, a book about Luis Barragán and the long shadow he cast — but it begins before him. In the 1920s, a generation of architect-engineers known as the Escuela Tapatía developed an abstract, stylised reinterpretation of the regional vernacular of Jalisco. Barragán was among them, and his early, little-known work from this period is examined here alongside his better-known mature practice. The book then follows that inheritance into the 1980s and 1990s, tracing a second generation of Guadalajara architects who worked in dialogue with and against Barragán's example. Throughout, Vassallo and Muñoz use domestic architecture as a lens for broader questions about the relationship between innovation and tradition, cosmopolitanism and regionalism, abstraction and memory in Mexican architectural culture.
Key Features
- Photographs by Naho Kubota documenting key houses across both generations
- Graphic design by Andrew LeClair
- Bilingual edition — English and Spanish throughout
What You'll Discover
- The Escuela Tapatía and its role in the formation of Mexican architectural modernity
- Barragán's early career in Guadalajara and its relationship to his later, internationally celebrated work
- How a second generation of Guadalajara architects renegotiated the Barragán inheritance in the 1980s and 1990s
- Guadalajara as an alternative centre of gravity in Mexican architectural history, counterpoint to Mexico City
About the Author
Jesús Vassallo is a Spanish architect and essayist, and an associate professor at Rice University in Houston. He is the author of Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture (Park Books, 2016) and Epics in the Everyday: Architecture, Photography and the Problem of Realism (Park Books, 2019). Jorge Alberto Muñoz graduated from Monterrey Institute of Technology with further studies at the University of Melbourne.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 176
- Dimensions: 28 x 23 cm
- Language: English / Spanish
- ISBN: 9783035629927
- Publisher: Birkhäuser
- Publication Date: 2026
Perfect For: Architects and historians with an interest in Mexican modernism, Latin American architectural history, housing typology, and the relationship between regionalism and the international modern movement