Las Pozas
Spring has arrived! Our research this week is led by the seasonal aspiration to step outside. How does a landscape affect the experience of a structure? How does a structure alter the landscape? We wonder. In so doing, we look to designers who have lived and worked at the meeting point of the outside and the in, of the natural and the fabricated. We turn to the surrealist eccentric, Edward James (1907-1984).
Born with an aristocratic pedigree, James used his inheritance to support a burgeoning interest in the obscure forms of art and architecture: the surreal. James was a poet rejecting the rigidity of the upper class, he was a muse to and supporter of Magritte and Dali, and he was ultimately an inventor of fantastical environments. During the last two decades of his life, he left England and brought this consciousness with him to an eighty-acre site in Xilitla, Mexico. He called it Las Pozas (the Pools).
The structures he commissioned there seem to have been found at the site, that’s part of their success. They emerge organically, entangled within the dense, ripe jungle, as if to beg the visitor to consider whether they’d always been there. That’s their surreal nature. If a champion should emerge from the collision between the concrete and jungle, the champion here seems to be the latter. The canopy of leaves envelopes each structure; the concrete becomes an extension for the vines and the trees to spread. Perhaps it is this submission to the land that’s most beautiful about Las Pozas, the structures are large and striking on their own, but they just as readily serve as a platform for nature to expand.
We’re taking inspiration from this to celebrate the outside world through design. Here are the images we love most.
