Intersections of architecture, photography, and personhood: Case studies in Mexican modernity (Juan O'Gorman, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Guillermo Kahlo, Esther Born)

This dissertation examines a series of intersections between architecture, photography, and personhood in early to mid-twentieth century Mexico City. By arranging several case studies thematically, by subject, and scale, the dissertation comments on varying forms of expressing and understanding modernity during this period, emphasizing the significance that personal encounters and inscriptions hold in the conceptualization of architecture. It studies temporality and representation as an intersection of privacy and publicity in domesticity and a site to negotiate the tension between the individual and the collective in architecture in which photography provides a lens to observe modernity in post-revolutionary Mexico.; Using architect and painter Juan O'Gorman's oeuvre as a point of departure, Chapter One discusses the role of cultural nationalism and the effects of O'Gorman's collaborations with Diego Rivera on the formation of nationally iconic cultural producers. Chapter Two considers the roles of artistic and architectural notions of interiority prominent in Mexico City during the 1930's and '40's, which distinguish themselves from predominant contemporary ideas of exteriority. Chapter Three examines O'Gorman's Mexico City house-studio for Frida Kahlo and Rivera of 1929-32, discussing the house studio, client-architect relationships, the problem of designing a house for a unique couple, the implications for their public and private lives, and the building's analogous relationship to them. Taking a cue from the question of cultural nationalism, Chapter Four examines the photography of Guillermo Kahlo and problematizes the imposition of associations between categories and artists. It explores the representation of architecture, its implications for modernity in the work of a German-immigrant Mexican photographer whose personal and professional trajectory embodies movement, and its expression of a male gaze. Chapter Five considers the representation of modern architecture in relation to reception in United States publications through the eye of a woman, Esther Born, an American architect-photographer who traveled to Mexico City in the 1930's and actively engaged transnational exchange. Within these locations and their intersecting axes, the dissertation emphasizes the transient, unstable, and reciprocal nature of cultural production that, while looking to the future, is simultaneously caught between the present and past.