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The period following the Mexican Revolution was characterized by unprecedented artistic experimentation. Seeking to express the revolution's heterogeneous social and political aims, which were in a continuous state of redefinition, architects, artists, writers, and intellectuals created distinctive, sometimes idiosyncratic theories and works.

Luis E. Carranza examines the interdependence of modern architecture in Mexico and the pressing sociopolitical and ideological issues of this period, as well as the interchanges between post-revolutionary architects and the literary, philosophical, and artistic avant-gardes. Organizing his book around chronological case studies that show how architectural theory and production reflected various understandings of the revolution's significance, Carranza focuses on architecture and its relationship to the philosophical and pedagogic requirements of the muralist movement, the development of the avant-garde in Mexico and its notions of the Mexican city, the use of pre-Hispanic architectural forms to address indigenous peoples, the development of a socially oriented architectural functionalism, and the monumentalization of the revolution itself. In addition, the book also covers important architects and artists who have been marginally discussed within architectural and art historiography.

Richly illustrated, Architecture as Revolution is one of the first books in English to present a social and cultural history of early twentieth-century Mexican architecture.

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CHOICE Review

Carranza (Roger Williams Univ.) evocatively investigates how architects and their patrons attempted to create architecture to serve the needs and, more to the point, further the social ideals of Mexico after the 1910-20 Revolution. He analyzes five key "episodes" spanning the early 1920s to the mid-1930s: the neocolonial-style headquarters for the Ministry of Public Education, commissioned by minister of public education Jose Vasconcelos; the modern metropolis figured in the art and poetry of the futurist-inspired Estridentista movement; the Maya-revival architecture of the Mexican Pavilion at the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition in Seville; the functionalist architecture of Juan O'Gorman; and the construction of the Monument to the Revolution and the Monument to Alvaro Obregon, the assassinated president. Each episode signals a different perspective on architecture as an agent of social change and a manifestation of national identity, as well as a further step in the institutionalization--and eventual co-optation--of the revolution. Carranza's meticulous research and critical astuteness offer important new insights into the theoretical debates among architects, and between architects and politicians, as he eloquently narrates the paradoxes of modernity in post-1920 Mexico. Summing Up; Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. E. Douglas University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill

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Luis E. Carranza is Associate Professor of Architecture at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island.