Juan O'Gorman was born in Coyoacán in 1905 to an Irish mining engineer who painted, and he never chose between the two trades. At twenty-four he built a house on a stepped tennis court in San Ángel and, with the studios he added for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, introduced Le Corbusier's vocabulary to Mexico. As head of the schools programme he designed twenty-six primary schools for the education ministry on the principle of maximum utility for minimum outlay. He then turned against his own doctrine: the mosaic-clad Central Library at the university campus and his lost lava-rock house in the Pedregal answer Frank Lloyd Wright and the Mesoamerican past instead. He took his own life in January 1982.
