THE ANZA FALCO MUSEUM OF DESIGN

Gallery Talk. The Prehispanic and the Modern Exhibition

Reception and gallery Talk by

Rafael Longoria

ACSA Distinguished Professor of Architecture

University of Houston

Tuesday November 16 at 6PM

THE ANZA FALCO MUSEUM OF DESIGN. The Prehispanic and the Modern Exhibition

Architecture and Nationalism in Porfirian and Revolutionary Mexico

“The Prehispanic and the Modern” analyzes the origins of a new formal identity that flourished in the cultural scene in Mexico as a consequence of the creation of a “New Nationalism” at the beginning of the 20th Century.

The exhibition extends its investigation to how these ideologies impacted the arts and influenced architectonic forms and styles in the rest of the modern world.

Exhibition: The Prehispanic and the Modern.
Art, Architecture and Nationalism in Porfirian and Revolutionary Mexico.

The Anza Falco Museum of Design presents "The Prehispanic and the Modern," an exhibition which reviews one of the most important art movements developed in Mexico from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth-century. During this remarkable period architectural forms and ornamentation elements from Mesoamerican cultures were incorporated into the new trends of twentieth-century modernism. This syncretism would help define Mexico’s new identity for the rest of the world while rescuing its cultural legacy and determining its future position in the arts.

The Mexican Pavilion at the International Fair, held in Paris in 1889 and designed by Antonio M. Anza, became the precursor of this movement and has become an essential icon for any discussion of National identity in contemporary Mexico. The building started a tendency that would last more than 60 years, a period that was characterized by an intense debate. The movement, originally developed in architecture, would have a major influence on the rest of the arts, such as painting, sculpture, graphic design and muralism. In the 1920s, this trend, based on historic recovery and integration, would significantly influence the work of architects like Frank Lloyd Wright.

The exhibition features an analytical description which identifies four essential buildings. It illustrates the origins and development of the "Neo-prehispanic" and the identification of its central figures. The analysis is based on important contributions from Jorge Reynoso Pohlenz, Gabriel Esquivel, Jorge Capetillo Ponce, Rafael Longoria and Mauricio Rodriguez Anza whose work offers a new perspective into an ongoing twenty-first- century which will be traduced into a new appreciation of this important cultural period. The project is enriched by the valuable photographic work of Juan San Juan Rebollar which was produced especially for this exhibition.


November 10, 2010 – January 28, 2011

3 Allen Center
333 Clay St. Houston

-

THE TEMP TEMP

The Anza Falco Museum of Design Temporary Site Office

Designed by Mauricio Rodriguez Anza

March 2, 2009. A Formal Presentation

In March 2, 2009, the project behind the Transitional Museum was presented for the very first time in public. The event took place at the Audrey Jones Beck Building, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

In the event, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce, a member of the board of Houston’s Anza Falco Museum of Art and Design, spoke about the origins of the museum and how it will approach its first phase of operations with the use of a temporary structure.

Capetillo-Ponce, presently Director of Latino Studies, Associate Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Community Development at University of Massachusetts, made reference of the importance of this first step for the museum.

He also abounded on the implications of having an alternative view on the design arts and how this will impact the establishment and the exploration of new routes of contemporary arts:

“My answer to you will consist of a host of interrelated arguments. One argument relating to the alternative character of the museum is that it does not fit within the conventional definition of a museum of design for the reason that its focus goes beyond the simple presentation of international trends and designers and into the exploration of the complex relationship between the emergence of design as an artistic, technological, economic and social force in the past one hundred years and the international artistic trends and diverse ideologies that filled the nineteenth, twenty and twenty first centuries and that had a constituting influence on its development and expansion".

"In other words, alternative here means that the museum experience is not merely an aesthetic one, but that the visitor acquires a deeper understanding of the complexity of the human enterprise. Yes, its focus is art and design but the presentation is interdisciplinary, which implies putting together teams of experts in different fields so as to arrive at a presentation, a style, that projects not only the different elements found in a specific artistic or designing trend but also the social, political and economic elements that allowed that particular trend to emerge in a particular time and space".

"Alternative also means that a central objective is to develop a critical eye, a critical stance in the visitor to the museum by avoiding passive interaction with the exhibit and promoting engagement and active participation. This entails developing a unique orientation and exhibition style based on continuous experimentation so as to arrive at an original and successful –but always changing—method that combines outreach, conservation and research functions to allow visitors to explore from a critical perspective the impact of particular movements, ideologies, groups and individual creators”.

Capetillo-Ponce also explored the potential impact of the Transitional Museum on the area where it will be located, using the theory of parasitism in architecture:

“An architecture of the parasite may be literally parasitical. That is, the formal presence, the architectural features, the services the new project offers to the community, would be such that its incorporation would allow it to remain formally distinct and yet programmatically interconnected with its host, that is with the new environment where it is inserted. While these projects could be envisaged as a permanent structure, a permanent institution like the Anza Falco Museum of Art and Design, it is also possible to understand parasitical architecture as impermanent and thus marked by a necessary temporality, as we have conceived the Transitional Museum".

"In this latter instance, what is involved is a temporary structure which, rather than being a space to which a specific program or content and infrastructure have to be brought, instead the temporary project ties in with pre-existing infrastructures and programs to open up new possibilities. In other words, the new structure and its content, despite being drawn as a temporary project, will intrude, as a parasite does into the human body, into the socio-economic and artistic fabric of the locality where it is implanted".

"We understand parasitism in architecture as a concept that allows for a new mode of thinking in the configuration of an urban landscape. In order to shed light onto this innovative concept and acquire a deeper understanding, let’s go back to the biological parasite. In general terms the parasite has to take up a position within the body, that is, it inserts itself into the spaces, the organs, that the host body provides. As such the grid of the body, its natural contours, boundaries and edges will not be recognized by the parasite. The parasite has to survive within the body and the condition of that survival would be its refusal to recognize lines that mark out pre-existing edges and boundaries, and in refusing specific edge conditions the parasite constructs its own edge conditions, and thus creates new boundaries".

"That refusal to acknowledge boundaries and edges, however, cannot be based on indifference or destruction. Any compromise undertaken by the parasite becomes a structural transformation of the body, or if we want to put it in architectural terms, of the site, the urban environment. Nevertheless, it is a transformation whose end is the maintenance of the parasitic relation”.

Attendants of the presentation also had the opportunity to learn about the history of the museum project, its origins and directions and a preview of what constitutes the museum collection. The video-presentation included images and information about the architectural project realized by Mauricio Rodriguez Anza and the series of different typologies considered for different areas and locations in the city of Houston.

Vivianne Falco and Mauricio Rodriguez Anza were present at the event and were able to answer questions from the audience.