Art: The Prisoner of Geometry

At 53, Spanish-born Felix Candela of Mexico is perhaps the most unassuming architect alive. About the closest he has ever come to immodesty is to say of his shell-like concrete structures and umbrella roofs that “this is the most functional architecture there is.” His adopted country enthusiastically agrees. There are more than 325 buildings in the republic that are at least structurally designed either by Candela or by authorized agents of his firm. Probably 100 more have sprung up in the rest of Latin America, as well as in the U.S. and Britain. But of all of these, none has been more ambitious than the project that President Adolfo López Mateos himself will dedicate next month—the large Alcoa complex two miles from the sea in the port of Veracruz.

The roof of the largest building, which stretches tunnel-like nearly 1,700 ft., is concrete poured over short, cylindrical shell forms and troweled by hand. A second building is basically an airy vault—a 200-ft. structure with two rows of nine columns running along each side. Because of the constant salt spray in the air, a steel building would have wasted a fortune in maintenance, and, in any case, this structure in concrete costs about 20% less. But, as always, Candela will pronounce it good only if it works. “It will not be me but Alcoa that decides if it is good.”

A onetime Spanish ski champion and soldier in the Republican army, Candela came to Mexico as a refugee in 1939. But it was not until eleven years later that he began experimenting with his shell structures and landed his first big commission, the Cosmic Ray Pavilion in University City. Since then his umbrellas and shells have popped up everywhere—as factories, housing projects, private homes, chapels or as shelters for the marketplace. The basic shell forms are only an inch or two thick, but they can be modified, tipped, inverted, varied almost indefinitely. In earlier days, Candela seemed to accomplish this feat of engineering almost by intuition; he gave the impression of looking down on those who mathematically calculated and recalculated stress. Today Candela checks his designs with the help of IBM machines at University City. “I am,” says he happily, “the prisoner of geometry.” Candela is usually content to let the soaring geometry speak for itself, but with churches, he admits with a grin, “we refine a little.” One of his most beautiful is the chapel in Lomas de Cuernavaca, done with Architect Guillermo Rosell. It is a pure hyperbolic paraboloid whose slender edges seem to float free and whose roof slopes from each end down to a skylight. Guarded by a tapering cross, it stands upon a lonely hill, surging toward the sky—a modern version of the mighty Gothic reach.