Join us for the presentation and book launch of Félix Candela from Mexico City to Chicago: Rise and Fall of Experimentations in Concrete (Actar, 2024). While Félix Candela’s captivating structures in Mexico and across the globe made him one of the most important and iconic architects of the twentieth century, we know very little about his work in the United States and his life in Chicago during the 1970s. Understanding this transitional period, however, enables us to see his innovations in a new light and to reevaluate the contexts of his work. The book links analyses of his celebrated structures with the specific societal, economic, urban, and material conditions that first facilitated his work in Mexico, then prompted his departure, and eventually complicated his practice in the US. Therefore, it also adds to our understanding of architecture’s transnational exchanges, while further exposing its complicated and often troubled relationship with labor, capital, and politics.

During this presentation, Alexander Eisenschmidt, editor, along with contributors Robert Bruegmann, Geoff Goldberg, Jonathan Miller, and Kathryn E. O'Rourke, discuss the publication and their contributions.

The book includes texts by Alexander Eisenschmidt, Juan Ignacio del Cueto, Nader Tehrani, Elisa María Teresa Drago Quaglia, Kathryn O’Rourke, Jonathan Miller, George F. Flaherty, Stanley Tigerman, Geoff Goldberg, William Baker, Bob Bruegmann, Stuart Cohen, Ero Aggelopoulou-Amiridis, and Kenneth Schroeder, in addition to translations, interviews, and republications by Félix Candela, Reyner Banham, Ester McCoy, Alvin Boyarsky, and Carl W. Condit.

The manuscript for the book was awarded a Graham Foundation publication grant, a Creative Activity Award from the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research, and the Faculty Scholarship Support Grant at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The initial research for this project was sponsored by UIC’s Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research.

A reception and book signing follows the event. A limited number of copies of Félix Candela from Mexico City to Chicago are available for purchase at the Graham Foundation Bookshop.

This program is presented in partnership with the School of Architecture at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and MAS Context.

Robert Bruegmann is a historian and critic of the built environment. After his 1976 PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1979, where he is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of art history, architecture and urban planning. Among his books are The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago 1880–1918 (1996), Sprawl: A Compact History (2005), The Architecture of Harry Weese (2010), and the edited volume Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America (2018). His main areas of research are the history of architecture, urban planning, landscape, and historic preservation.

Alexander Eisenschmidt is a theorist, designer, and associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Architecture. He directs the Visionary Cities Project and leads Studio Offshore. Eisenschmidt is author of The Good Metropolis (2019), guest-editor of City Catalyst (2012), and the co-editor of Chicagoisms (2013) and The Project(s) of Modern Architecture (2017). His research and design works have been published and exhibited at a range of international venues such as the Venice Biennale (2012), the Art Institute of Chicago (2014), the Biennale on Urbanism in Shenzhen, China (2015), and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale in Portugal (2016).

Geoffrey Goldberg has practiced architecture and urban design in Chicago for more than 30 years. Projects done under his direction include planning for an urban airport, building a new city college, and design management of large public transportation initiatives. He has taught architectural design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, urban design at Harvard University, and the history of form at the University of Chicago. Goldberg has published architectural and engineering histories, and has been awarded for his work in design, urban planning, and historical research.

Jonathan Miller is an educator, critic, and artist. He is a studio associate professor in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he teaches classes on film, architecture, cities, and landscape. For many years, he reviewed films and interviewed filmmakers on Chicago Public Radio. He has presented numerous public film series and served on film festival juries. His artwork has been exhibited in the United States and Europe.

Kathryn E. O’Rourke is an architectural historian and professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, where she teaches courses on modern architecture and Latin American art. O’Rourke is the author of Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), which received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. She is the editor of O’Neil Ford on Architecture (University of Texas Press, 2019), and is at work on two book projects: Home, Heat, Money, God: Texas and Modern Architecture (2024) and Archaism and Liberalism in Modern Architecture.

Image: Félix Candela and UICC Students posing below an experimental dome, south wall Art and Architecture Laboratories, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, Chicago, c. 1972. Félix Candela Papers, Library and Special Collections, Princeton University