Nora Quintanilla
New York, October 18 The treasures of Mexican organic architecture and its vision of a life in harmony with nature can be found starting this Tuesday at the Noguchi Museum in New York, which presents several projects by Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman and Javier Senosiain.
The museum, dedicated to the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi and located in the borough of Queens, has metaphorically transformed its galleries into an underground environment that invites you to discover the ideas of these four architects and artists through models, sculptures, paintings, sketches or photographs. .
One of the most notable pieces is the detailed model of the “Quetzalcoatl’s Nest”, a masterpiece of Senosiain’s career, an eight hectare “habitable sculpture” to which he has dedicated his attention and energy since 1998 and which today, his 74 years, continues. develop north-west of the Mexican capital.
Senosiain, founder of the Arquitectura Orgánica studio in Mexico City and a “bio-architecture” scholar, is responsible for much of the exhibition thanks to his effort to preserve the legacy of his predecessors, which led him to create some great prototypes of his works that does not skimp on details.
This is the case of the cave-house that Juan O’Gorman (1905-1982), functionalist who became organic architect, had built in 1948 in the lava bed of an inactive volcano near the capital and which is currently in ruins but can be admired in a model wearing elaborate mosaics with snake motifs.
FOLLOW THE SNAKE
Senosiain designed a large snake covered with colored tiles especially for the exhibition, with which he invites you to sit on his lap and see the animal “as a guide we could follow towards a better future”, said Dakin Hart, curator of the museum. , in a media visit.
The visit begins with “The Echo Serpent”, colossal metal sculpture by his mentor, Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990), which is integrated into the Noguchi garden and houses a gallery conceived as a cave, with its “nest”, and a room adorned with stars that pretends to be the exit.
The tour ends with Carlos Lazo (1914-1955), who died at the age of 41 in an accident that plunged a lightning-fast career as an architect into oblivion, of which a mural photograph of his social housing project “Grotte” is shown. Civilians “, integrated into a canyon, a project that has not survived.
The curator, Hart, points out that the four architects “have a way of looking at the world that does not seek to reduce or go back, nor to have an innocent nostalgia, but to study what our ancestors did in the past and see how it can reuse. a traditional technology to help us in the future “.
“CRAZY IDEAS, TODAY WITH SENSE”
“These ideas, which in the 1940s were crazy, so to speak, but modernist ideas, today make a lot of sense in the contemporary world”, Ricardo Suárez, art consultant and promoter of the exhibition, explains to EFE, underlining the “devastation” of the climate crisis, among other threats to humanity.
Suárez, who runs the Risuha consulting firm in Baja California Sur (Mexico) and has dug into the archives of these architects who claim to reconnect with the Earth, wrote to the Noguchi museum proposing to organize an exhibition to introduce them, an idea that ended up to the connection with the mission of the museum.
“In Mexico people are usually very mainchist: the Mexican does not recognize the talent of the Mexican if a foreigner does not die or comes and says that this man is a genius”, adds the expert, who is interested in the “recognition of (again ) alive “, Senosiain, as well as” the three who are no more “.
The common thread, he adds, is the “subspace”, which in Japanese culture is located “from the dining table down” and in pre-Hispanic cultures in the “underground world”, and which gives rise to an accompanying exhibition focused on the work of Noguchi interest in invisible forces and the occult with about forty sculptures and drawings. EFE
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