During a talk about Reflejos de Zohn: Guadalajara en edificios e imágenes, cocurator Lorena Canales asked me if I had ever been to Guadalajara. I said yes, but it was more like a no—I haven’t been in over ten years. Recently, interest in Mexican design and architecture has attracted visitors to specific landmarks and little-known buildings that illustrate the country’s architectural legacy and contemporary design scene. Even though the rest of the country has a vast catalog of architecture, these visitors’ focus—as well as my own—has largely been on Mexico City. That’s where the best-known buildings are: the Teotihuacán pyramid complex, the Museo Tamayo, the Casa-Estudio Luis Barragán. Mimi Zeiger, cocurator of Reflejos de Zohn, said that this bias was in part what spurred her and her cocurators’ desire to draw attention to Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest metropolitan area, by highlighting the work of architect Alejandro Zohn.
Born in 1930 in Austria, Alejandro Zohn immigrated at the age of eight to Tlaquepaque, a town now part of Guadalajara. Because there was no architecture school in Guadalajara at the time, he started studying civil engineering in 1948. When the architecture school was established a year later, he enrolled simultaneously to study architecture, on the suggestion of his professor Mathias Goeritz. He lived and worked in Guadalajara the rest of his life, designing over five hundred buildings in the state of Jalisco. Mexican architecture giant Luis Barragán was also born in Guadalajara, but unlike him, Alejandro Zohn and his architecture are scarcely known outside of the state. Reflejos de Zohn might be the beginning of changing that. Zeiger and her cocurators Tony Macarena—a Mexico City self-described queeratorial duo composed of Lorena Canales and Alejandro Olávarri—commissioned five artists to interpret Zohn’s work, moving away from a static practice of architectural documentation toward an interpretive one. Such an approach makes the buildings’ stories, not just their architectural qualities, the focus of the exhibition.
In the galleries, visitors get to know six of Zohn’s projects, with examples from both his civic and commercial work. In full panoramic photographs, artist duo Lake Verea shift the perspective on Zohn’s most celebrated building, the Mercado Libertad–San Juan de Dios (1958–59), by inviting viewers to look at the periphery, which surrounds the market. Nondescript matter, rendered in dark hues, spills out of the market stalls, exposing the traces of a recent fire. A nearby gallery wall full of tin-plated and galvanized everyday objects—designed by Guadalajara artist Fabien Capello and manufactured in Guadalajara by craftspeople Arturo and María Vega and Alejo and Antonio Pérez—brings one of the many crafts from the market into the room, reinforcing the closeness of architecture and life. Around the corner, Nezahualcóyotl-based Sonia Madrigal’s photographs of Zohn’s former shopping center Edificio Mulbar (1973–74) point out the gap between a building’s origin and its current state. One of the photos, at first, seems straightforward: a picture of a sunset. But wall text reveals that in 2019, Atzhiri Paulina Sánchez Sánchez, a student at the University of Guadalajara, was the victim of a femicide there. According to witnesses, the same sunset captured by Madrigal is the reason that Sánchez visited the building. Madrigal, who was escorted out of the building during her first visit and not allowed back, employs a distant approach; some photographs were taken from inside a hotel room across the street.
The small taste of Zohn’s work in this show might trigger viewers’ curiosity about the rest of his projects, as well as the work of other lesser-known architects and the stories their buildings might contain. And the artists’ varied interpretations invite viewers to examine life in a building, to really confront the interactions that happen within them, to not settle for archival materials handpicked by an architect from a collection.
Other artists, though, managed to get closer, revealing more humble effects in Zohn’s works. Hoping to find and capture traces of life in the housing complex CTM-Atemaiac (1977–79), videographer and photographer Onnis Luque visited its residents three times, producing colorful images that show multigenerational characters framed by Zohn’s rhythmic shapes. Zohn, like many of his contemporaries, welcomed Modernist ideas. In his Manual de Vegetación Urbana para Guadalajara, Jalisco, Zohn prescribes an orderly approach for the landscape design of a street using only one species of trees, rather what existed in Guadalajara at the time: a mix of species he described as “disorder, chaos and lack of harmony.” Taking this attitude as a reference point, artist Adam Wiseman created Orden/Caos, a moving-image contribution that surfaces the tension between the binary values of chaos and order. Careful images of Concha Acústica (1958) and Unidad Deportiva Adolfo López Mateos (1956-59) show the passage of time, where chaos inevitably takes over even the most rigid modernist plan. In another instance of architecture melding with the quotidian, the Archivo del Estado de Jalisco (1985–91), one of Zohn’s final and most recognizable structures, appears in photographs by Zara Pfeiffer, the everyday act of retrieving documents rendered near ceremonial.
Sketches, drawings, images, and architectural models from Zohn’s archive complement the artists’ interpretations, and the curators state that one of the goals of Reflejos de Zohn was to place special attention on Zohn’s vast archive, which is managed by his daughter Diana Zohn Ceballos and still has no institutional support. Zohn’s buildings make up an important part of the architectural landscape in Jalisco, particularly in Guadalajara, where they make a range of daily life activities possible. The small taste of Zohn’s work in this show might trigger viewers’ curiosity about the rest of his projects, as well as the work of other lesser-known architects and the stories their buildings might contain. And the artists’ varied interpretations invite viewers to examine life in a building, to really confront the interactions that happen within them, to not settle for archival materials handpicked by an architect from a collection.
This impulse to go deeper is at the heart of the show. Canales tells me she hopes that by getting to know Zohn’s work, viewers might also get to know Guadalajara, her hometown. Second-place status brings both external disregard and, in response, a desire to be seen. Reflejos de Zohn might communicate that desire and, in enticing visitors to get to know the city, might also play a role in satisfying it.