Félix Candela from Mexico City to Chicago - by Alexander Eisenschmidt (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This book is a collection of essays centers on Félix Candela's departure from Mexico City and arrival in Chicago during the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s.

Felix Candela, one of the most important and iconic architects of the 20th century, became world-renowned for his many captivating concrete-shell structures in Latin America and across the globe. Félix Candela From México City to Chicago provides a unique lens in the specific political, economic,
and material conditions that always surrounded, often promoted, and occasionally inhibited his work.

To understand the timeframe of the 1970s, different essays had to delve into archives and conducted interviews with his former friends, students, and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he was teaching. Many of these findings will be presented here for the first time, aiming to illuminate this complex constellation of inventions, events, and external forces that surrounded Candela's work.

Review Quotes

"Eisenschmidt's book balances new essays (by Eisenschmidt, Nader Tehrani, Geoffrey Goldberg [son of Bertrand], Robert Bruegmann, and others), interviews (with Tigerman, William Baker, Stuart Cohen, and Kenneth Schroeder), and archival texts (by Candela, Reyner Banham, Esther McCoy, Alvin Boyarsky, Carl W. Condit, and others) to provide a deeply researched history on an overlooked aspect of an influential, one-of-a-kind architect-builder-engineer." --A Weekly Dose of Architecture