Enrique del Moral

Enrique del Moral Dominguez (21 January 1905 – 11 June 1987) was a Mexican architect and an exponent of the functionalism movement, a modernist group that included Mexican artists and architects such as José Villagrán Garcia, Carlos Obregón Santacilia, Juan O'Gorman, Eugenio Peschard, Juan Legarreta, Carlos Tarditti, Enrique de la Mora and Enrique Yanez.

Enrique del Moral Domínguez was born on 21 January 1905 in Irapuato, Guanajuato, the only son of Enrique del Moral and Maria de los Angeles Dominguez.

Four years later, in 1909, the family moved to Mexico City, where Del Moral attended elementary, middle and high school at the Franco-English Institute.

There, he met Juan O'Gorman, who went on to study architecture with Del Moral at the Academy of San Carlos.

During the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution, Enrique del Moral's mother Maria sought safety with her son in El Paso, Texas, where his mother had family.

The trip to the United States gave him the lifelong nickname "El Gringo" as well as provided Del Moral with an outsider's view of the country.

Enrique de Moral returned to Mexico to see a nation devastated by war and decades of poverty that was, at the same time, immensely rich in landscape, materials and culture.

At 18 years of age, Enrique del Moral met architect José Villagrán Garcia when he was a student and a colleague of Del Moral's cousin, Eduardo Jiménez del Moral, and soon afterward became interested in the architectural profession.

In 1923 he entered the Faculty of Architecture (UNAM), which then had a staff of only 36 students and was housed in the old Academy of San Carlos.

In the year 1924, del Moral was invited to enter into a draftsmanship with Villagrán and Carlos Obregón Santacilia, the two most innovative architects in the country.

With the latter, he participated in building projects for the Bank of Mexico (1925) and the Ministry of Health (1928), works with a clearly modern sensibility.

Del Moral became one of the first students of Villagrán invited to teach a free workshop on composition.

Shortly after 1926, and under the guidance of his mentor, del Moral, like many architects of his generation, began the study of a new architectural theory: functionalism.

Functionalism emphasized the idea that every work comes from "a method that is determined by thoroughly analyzing and correctly interpreting a solution to guarantee success".

These new values were extolled in the theories of "utility", "constructive sincerity, ""esthetics or harmony" and "social or moral value."

All this meant a definitive break with the traditional architecture of academicism which was limited by its tendency to outright copy the French or Spanish colonial styles, with facades adorned with Greco-Roman, Neoclassical moulding.

On 29 November 1928 he was received as an architect.

A few months later, after winning the lottery, Enrique del Moral undertook a trip to Europe for a full year in order to better understand the architectural expressions there, traveling to England, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Emulating Le Corbusier, who studied with pencil in hand the styles of the classics of European architecture, Del Moral created a series of drawings and watercolors of houses and buildings that possessed what he felt was an extraordinary quality.

The movement developed from innovative concepts presented by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus school as well as Die Stijl, and remodeled the profile of cosmopolitan Mexico City and other cities in the 1930s.

At this time he participated in projects such as the Monument to the Revolution, Reform Hotel and Hotel Prado with the architect Marcial Gutierrez Camarena, and the house of Manuel Gomez Morin (1930) with Juan O'Gorman.

During the thirties, Enrique del Moral started his first projects as an independent architect, as well as his teaching career at the Faculty of Architecture (UNAM).

Upon his return, he continued working in the studio of Obregón Santacilia, where he rose to building resident, then to foreman and then to partnership (1933–35).

From 1934 on he taught the subjects of Draftsmanship and Composition (which was a beginning course until 1950).

In 1936 he set up his private office, associated with the architect Marcial Gutiérrez Camarena.

His first project was to build ten houses for workers in his hometown of Irapuato, a project with a strong social context, drafted from surveys conducted with the workers and their families and adapted to the economic conditions of the inhabitants as well as the environment.

On 30 November 1940 Del Moral married Elisa Madrid Moreno.

After his marriage, Enrique del Moral completed many private projects; primarily residential houses and apartment buildings in zoned residential areas of Mexico City.

However, there were contemporary public works projects that Del Moral collaborated on or oversaw; austere solutions that favored the use of local materials and avoiding waste.

He was responsible for The General Hospital of San Luis Potosí (1943), and shortly afterward, began his period as Area Manager of the Administrative Committee of the Federal Program for School Construction (1944–46), during which time he built state schools such as the School of Casacuarán, Guanajuato (1946).

His spirit of curiosity about Mexican past and the present of the architecture developed in the country prompted him to enroll in the Seminar on the History of Ideas and Culture in the Eighteenth Century, taught by Dr. Jose Gaos in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM).

From 1943 to 1946, the two men shared ideas and friendship with other intellectuals interested in discovering the essence of the Mexican culture in philosophy, science and art: Edmundo O'Gorman, Leopoldo Zea, Bernabe Navarro and Justin Fernandez, among others.

The experience paid off.

Del Moral modernized curricula during his time as director of the Faculty of Architecture (UNAM) (1944–1949), incorporating philosophies acquired from like-minded architects such as Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology as well as Mexican philosophy on esthetic espoused by Dr. Jose Gaos in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature (UNAM).

He dedicated a large amount of his academic life to lecturing both domestically and abroad, and published books and essays on the evolution of architectural styles.

He theorized about functionalism in Mexico and debated controversial issues of his time, such as the integration of plastic arts into architecture, and promoted the conservation of cities, approaching architecture in a way that could find balance between traditional and modern styles.

In 1945 he wrote "The Baroque Stylistic Phenomenon", the first in a series of essays and articles that developed over four decades and which addressed a wide range of topics on history, theory, commitment, and modern architecture.

Some of them are fundamental to understanding firsthand the avant-garde architectural movement in the Twentieth Century and their authors (Le Corbusier, Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus, De Stijl), as well as the details of functionalism in Mexico.

Over a span of more than fifty years, Enrique de Moral was designer and builder of over 100 public and private works in large metropolitan areas such as Mexico City as well as his hometown of Irapuato, but is primarily known for his role in the overall plan of the Ciudad Universitaria (1947–1952), site of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), along with the architects Mario Pani and Salvador Ortega.

He was responsible for the direction and coordination of the master project and the Rectorship Tower, one of the most representative features of the campus.