Introduction

Friday, August 26, 2011

MANIFESTO OF EMOTIONAL ARCHITECTURE

In his Manifesto de la Arquitectura Emocional (1953), Mathias Goeritz wrote: “I have worked with total freedom to make work whose function is to produce emotion. The aim is to restore architecture’s status as art.” 

Goeritz’s manifestos and Mensajes (Messages) from 1960-62 constitute a critical aspect of his larger artistic project of “emotional architecture,” a regionalist theorization of Siegfried Giedion’s World War II-era call for a “new monumentality” for Mexico City’s rapidly developing urban landscape during and after the 1950s. Ultimately, monumental, abstract, site-specific sculptures, rather than gallery spectacles, would serve as the vehicle through which Goeritz expressed his “aesthetic prayers,” works that lie at the nexus of post-1945 Latin American developmentism and his dream of a generalized, modern, cosmopolitan spirituality.

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