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Mexican Architect Mijares Honored for His Contribution to Modern Architecture

Sunday, September 23, 2012 23:43

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(Before It's News)

Mexican architect Carlos Mijares Bracho was honored at an event this weekend in Mexico City for his work on religious and public buildings using the traditional bricks known as “xamixcalli.”

Some 200 people took part in the event Saturday at Mexico City’s Christ Church, the Anglican church considered most representative of his style.

Artes de Mexico magazine editor Alberto Ruy Sanchez praised Mijares as a “great architect, thinker and teacher” who has the ability to create modern works using pre-Hispanic construction materials.

Mijares, who was born in 1930, considers bricks a “symbol of life” and uses “this baked object” in a “simple way, prefabricated with earth, water and fire,” giving the material “new uses,” reinventing it and employing it in a creative way, Ruy Sanchez said.

Mijares’s architecture has “achieved greatness with such a simple and common material, something used so commonly,” Spanish-born Mexican artist Vicente Rojo told Efe, referring to the architect’s use of bricks.

Rojo, who founded Artes de Mexico in 1953, said Mijares’s work had “very special value” because he was a creator who was not “in the dominant line.”

Mijares’s best known buildings, other than Christ Church, are the Perpetuo Socorro Church in Ciudad Hidalgo and several houses around Mexico City, such as the Diaz Barreiro house.