Lomas de Chapultepec / Manuel Parra

Private residence by Manuel Parra, located in Lomas de Chapultepec, Mexico City. The owner of the house has lived there since he was a young child. His father commissioned Parra to design the home in the early 1960s.

Manuel Parra (1911–1997) designed and built hundreds of houses, mostly in Mexico. Various sources state that he created anywhere from 100 to 500 residences. He was inspired to study architecture by his uncle, architect Antonio Rivas Mercado, who designed the Ángel de la Independencia on Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. In addition to architecture, Parra was a sculptor, furniture designer, and ceramicist. He was active from the 1930s to the 1990s, and this house was built right in the middle of his career. I also visited a house he designed in the 1990s, which I will post separately.

Parra's signature was the utilization of materials from colonial buildings, which he collected from all around Mexico. He salvaged these architectural elements and materials from demolished or soon-to-be-demolished buildings at a time when Mexico was moving toward a more modern, International Style aesthetic. Close friends nicknamed Parra “El Caco” (“The Thief”) because he would often take pieces from demolition sites without permission. He seamlessly incorporated these traditional colonial and archaeological materials into contemporary spaces designed for modern living. Although modern in concept, his designs maintained a cultural identity deeply rooted in Mexico's past.

It took me a bit to see Para's work as "modern". That's no doubt because I was viewing it compared to the typical International Style of modernism. Parra was in fact working in reaction to that "machine for living" ideal. Take that Corbu.

Jaime Francisco Gómez G. and Cintia Anastasia Paez Ruiz from the University of Guadalajara wrote a paper on Parra in 2014. It lays out an eloquent explanation of his work and how his designs were modern, with the goal of enhancing the human experience within the context of a Mexican identity. You can read Mexican tradition and continuity on Manuel Parra Mercado’s (1911-1997) works: a statement for locality, here.