Arquitectura y surrealismo : Barragán y O'Gorman, dos procesos en busca de una tradición.
Authors:   , Loredo Cansino Reina Isabel 
Published: October 2023

The great dilemma of the 19th century, in art and architecture, was the conciliation between order and liberty. It was not exclusively about wager on the new or the old, the mechanic or the natural, but it was related to the finding of a harmonic and balanced relationship, that allows the rise and evolution of the images and forms that would come into being the ideals of the Modernity. Therefore, artists and architects rejected the banal use of the history, as a producer of forms and styles, and triggered the reconciliation, integration, coexistence, and dialogue with the inherit past and tradition .
That is the case of the Artistic Avant-gardes, specially the Surrealism, a movement that assayed with techniques and methods. Through this it was re-considered the relation of concepts such as time, space, history and tradition , developing the bases for the experimentation with the mechanisms of perception and expression, the collective memory, dreams, utilization of archetypical and symbolic material, and the objectivation of the unconscious activity. These techniques and methods had resonance in some modern architects , whom from previous theoretical discourses such those of Schinkel or Semper (that defend a deeper use of the traditional forms , and the re-interpretation of the types), reflected about the concept of tradition and made an effort to discover the objective forms of it.
The dissertation reflects on the compositional character of the architecture, inquiring into the ambit of the processes and generating ideas of the modern project, revealing that the modern architects also sought the establishment of a particular nexus with the history, denying the rejection of the heritage from the past, investigated and experimented with the vernacular and the primitive, immersing themselves in the storage of the tradition, the one of the objective forms, forms that were above the languages and styles. Thus, it is deeply and independently deployed the conceptual structures that prefigured the Avantgard and Modern Architecture, and that causes the present interpretation about concepts such as tradition , time, the habitual and particularly the special configuration .
In the aim of re-reading the Mexican architecture of the post-revolutionary age and its relationship with the Avant-garde, it was analyzed the architectonic production of Juan O'Gorman and Luis Barragán, through three typical compositional mechanisms of the avant-garde: the automation, the displacement, and the spaesamento or disorientation, which allow to state the underlying existence of certain concepts related to the Surrealism. This approach to determined works of the architects, explains two trajectories which , despite being parallel, are defined by common elements that have much to do with the primitive sources in which their work is based.
Without the will to wager for the existence of a surrealist architecture, this research avoids seeing the Surrealism as a system of production of forms, but recognizes that, thanks to the experimentation in the production processes of the Artistic Avantgarde, an alternative door was open in the general creative process with incidence in the modern cultural debate.