O'GORMAN, JUAN

born July 6, 1905, Coyoacn, Mex.found dead Jan. 18, 1982, Mexico City Mexican architect and muralist who created imaginative mosaic designs that adorned the facades of buildings. The most elaborate example of O'Gorman's work is the exterior of the Library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which he planned and built in 1950. The windowless library featured a tower containing book stacks and covered with mosaics, constructed of natural minerals, which symbolically present a history of Mexican culture. O'Gorman gained an early exposure to drawing and composition through his father, Cecil Crawford O'Gorman, a well-known painter who settled in Mexico. After graduating in 1927 from the school of architecture of the National University of Mexico, Mexico City, the younger O'Gorman began designing houses and buildings in Mexico in the International Style of the functionalist architect Le Corbusier. Included among these designs were, in 1928, the house and studio of muralist Diego Rivera, a close associate. O'Gorman worked as chief draftsman for Carlos Santacilia and other architects in Mexico City until 1932, at which time he became head of the Department of Building Construction for Mexico City and professor of architecture at the National Polytechnic Institute. At this time he founded a study group for workers' housing and was responsible for the design and construction for the Ministry of Education of some 30 schools along functionalist lines. Some of O'Gorman's major works in Mexico City included murals and frescoes at the National Museum of Anthropology, the airport, and the Museum of National History in Chapultepec Castle. (The important murals at the airport were removed in 1939 because of their anticlerical and antifascist character.) His mosaics appear on the Secretara de Comunicaciones y Obras Pblicas (1952) and on the facade of the Posada de la Misin Hotel in Taxco. These works feature complex and imaginative subject matter depicted in meticulous brushstrokes. O'Gorman's own house outside Mexico City (195356, demolished 1969) was considered his most extraordinary work. It marked his eventual rejection of functionalism in favour of an approach uniting modern structural designs and forms with indigenous Mexican decorative motifs. His home was in part a natural cave in rocks and was designed to harmonize with the lava formations of the landscape. It was also decorated with mosaic symbols and images from Aztec mythology.