A Rhetoric of Hygiene: Juan O'Gorman's Functionalism and the Futures of the Mexican Cityscape

Abstract

This article analyses the concept of hygiene in Mexican functionalist architect Juan O'Gorman's written manifestos and building projects from the early 1930s. O'Gorman's technical notion of hygiene, in which architecture addresses social inequality, and describes a fluid system of exchange between bodies and the built spaces they inhabit, both overlaps and conflicts with a broader nationalist version of hygiene geared towards a eugenic and aesthetic vision of Mexico's future. In 1932 O'Gorman began collaboration with the Secretaría de Educación Pública on the design of a series of urban primary schools, in accordance with a hygenicist-eugenic logic to promote the health and well-being of the family and the future of the nation. This project, as well as O'Gorman's writing of the period, exemplifies the architect's insistence on the technical over the aesthetic, and the ways in which the rhetoric of hygiene serves to highlight conflicts between an overarching revolutionary nationalist project, and the immediate technical and social goals of building design. Analysis of O'Gorman's work reveals not only the origins of his eventual disillusion with the state-sponsored logic of building for a Mexican future, but also the crucial role of hygiene itself as symptomatic of a multiple and fractured post-revolutionary discourse.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ignacio Sánchez Prado and two anonymous readers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Research support for this article was provided by the Connaught Fund, University of Toronto.

Notes

 1 All translations of O'Gorman are mine.

 2 Alberto Pani's 1916 text provides empirical data on categories such as illness rates, mortality, education and sanitation from the immediate pre-revolutionary period. For a contemporary analysis of data for the mid-1930s, see Olsen 2008, especially 182–98.

 3 For a distinct reading of the notion of a rhetoric of hygiene, in the Colombian context, see Diana Obregón 2003.

 4 This argument borrows in part from the critical project of Ignacio Sánchez Prado's Naciones Intelectuales, in which the author proposes a ‘reappropriation of literature for the imagination of alternative strategies for understanding the nation, and a revindication of the role of literature as space of functional intellectual articulation even within hegemonic systems’ (my translation; 10).

 5 Vasconcelos's brief discussion of ‘modern architecture’ within the text of Estética offers an additional point of contrast to O'Gorman's views. His overall impression of this architecture is primarily negative for its lack of aesthetic appeal and adornment. He notes for example the ‘stinginess’ (mezquindad) of the staircases, and blames the ‘greedy hearts of the industrial era’ (1611, my translation).

 6 Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Edward Burian's discussion of the differences and links between technical education and the humanities, as well as between the writing of José Vasconcelos and the discourse of technical rationalism (24–37), is useful here.

 7 Antonio Toca Fernández provides additional discussion of links and parallels between the work of O'Gorman and that of Meyer.

 8 My translation. The citation originates from a lecture by Dr. Adrián Correa, as summarized by Dr. Alfredo M. Saavedra, and cited in Suárez y López Guazo 2005: 146. This concept of hygiene as linked to eugenics during the first decades of twentieth-century Mexico has been extensively studied by Nancy Leys Stepan in her classic work, The Hour of Eugenics, as well as by Alexandra Stern. Hygiene here differs somewhat from its nineteenth-century variants, as studied by Latinamericanist scholars such as Michael Aronna and Gabriella Nouzeilles, who have emphasized discourses of the elimination of pathology and difference. In twentieth-century Mexico too, hygiene works as part of a biopolitics grounded in representations of the national, with the difference that it is marked by the international rise of eugenics, and by the revolutionary concept of the popular.

 9 Also see Stepan 1991: 67–76 for discussion of Lamarck's influence in early twentieth-century French medical circles, and subsequent impact in Mexico. An excellent resource on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European concepts of hygiene, race and eugenics and their impact in Mexico is Beatriz Urías Horcasitas's 2005 article.

10 Nancy Leys Stepan has demonstrated the confluence between hygiene and eugenics in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina in this period. As she writes, in reference to Latin American eugenics of the period, ‘Various names for this eugenics suggest themselves to the historian: “preventive eugenics”, ”social eugenics”, “eugenics and social medicine”, “eugenic hygiene”. But whatever the name, it meant a eugenics that linked a sanitary environment to racial health’ (85).

11 In his text Adorno discusses the impasse of anti-ornamental functionalism, noting for example: ‘The difference between the necessary and the superfluous is inherent in a work, and is not defined by the work's relationship – or the lack of it- to something outside itself’ (7). His analysis suggests a conflict similar to that encountered by O'Gorman in his discussion of technical functionalism. Yet Adorno lacks O'Gorman's cynicism here, and ultimately upholds the role of a critically productive ‘modified aesthetics’ (19) in architecture and in all art.

12 Beatriz González Stephan has written on hygiene as rhetoric as an interpretation of health codes and discursive practices in nineteenth-century Latin American cities. In her argument, based largely on the Manual de urbanidad y buenas maneras, by Manuel Antonio Carreño, proper speech and bodily cleanliness would work to civilize and homogenize national citizenry, as an antidote to barbarism. O'Gorman's rhetoric of hygiene is somewhat distinct from the nineteenth-century ‘civilizing’ rhetoric found in Carreño and in other manuals that González Stephan cites, because O'Gorman emphasizes temporal and structural fluidity in his logic, borrowing from the paradigm of eugenics, with emphasis on continuity rather than on separation or absolute elimination.

13 Here Foucault is referring to the origins of American neo-liberalism, which he contextualizes as beginning in the mid-1930s, as part of a response to Roosevelt's New Deal (216). This historical context corresponds to O'Gorman's period of critical activity in question, as well as to a period of increased urbanization and foreign investment in Mexico, in partial conflict with President Lázaro Cárdenas's mission of collective social justice for the nation.

14 A particularly useful source on this topic is Daniel Vargas Parra's essay, ‘Fisiología lúdica de la higiene’, in which the author analyses the role of sex education in 1930s Mexico as a project of the Sociedad Eugenésica Mexicana, and its shifting ties to both explicit eugenics and diverse hygiene programs.

15 O'Gorman's unpublished 1955 essay ‘The degeneration of architecture in Mexico today’ provides insight into the architect's ongoing conflicts with global architectural trends, and their influence in Mexico. See Eggener 2009.

16 It is worth noting here that the history of functionalist architecture reveals varied approaches to the complex relationship between functionality and aesthetics. For example, O'Gorman was influenced by both Le Corbusier and the Mexican architect José Villagrán García, who is famous for his 1929 design of the Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Huipulco, among other structures. Yet as Kathryn E. O'Rourke argues in her recent article, Villagrán was in turn heavily influenced by the French architects Julien Guadet and Auguste Perret, and the Beaux Arts tradition of symmetry, proportion (71) and ‘the projection of authority’ (72). According to O'Rourke, Villagrán, unlike O'Gorman in his early work, ‘did not deny the importance of beauty in architecture’ (70), despite participating in the ‘structural honesty’ (69) of modernist architecture. For more on Le Corbusier's influence on O'Gorman, and on the distinctive quality of O'Gorman's Mexican functionalism, see Fraser 2000: 38–41, 55. Also see Burian 2003.

17 Despite this insistence on the elimination of artistic expression, O'Gorman did allow for the inclusion of murals in the primary schools he designed. As Luis Carranza notes, ‘Anything added to the architecture that appeared to be nonfunctional or ornamental (paint, art, sculpture, and so forth)… needed to didactically express the social aims of the functionalist building’ (148). Ariadna Patiño Guadarrama offers a more detailed analysis of the role of Julio Castellanos's tryptic mural in the Escuela Héroes de Churubusco, and suggests that, in general, O'Gorman saw the murals in schools as obeying a didactic imperative (147). Yet even if the murals could be said to fulfil such aims, their presence seems to conflict with much of O'Gorman's writing on technical functionalism. A more complete understanding of the role of images in O'Gorman's functionalism would require broader historical contextualization, and is beyond the scope of the present article.

18 For an engaging and useful reading of O'Gorman's architectural nationalism in later decades, in contrast to the vision of Luis Barragán, see Keith Eggener (2000).

19 Examples include ‘Después del diluvio que nos trajo el arca’ (1967) and ‘Corrupción y polución en nuestra maravillosa civilización’ (1975). On this mode of O'Gorman's painting, see for example Rodríguez Prampolini 2005, and Caleb Bach 2006.

20 In a 2010 follow-up project to Utopía-no utopía, titled Encauzar la mirada: arquitectura, pedagogía e imágenes en México, 1920–1950, the editors ultimately focus less on an absolute hierarchical domination of the bodies of school children, and more on diverse modes of observation, and on the complex intersection of activities from both within and outside the classroom (30).

21 Also see Keith Eggener's reading of this painting in his 2003 essay.

22 For more on the growth of investment capital and the industrialization of Mexico City in this period, see Diane E. Davis 1994: 109–14.

23 The text does not specify the time period for which the cost is calculated.