Preserving the legacy of Helen and Juan O’Gorman

Fundación O’Gorman is an effort by the descendants of Juan and Helen O’Gorman, our friends and supporters. We are dedicated to preserving the architectural and artistic legacy of famed Mexican modernist architect Juan O’Gorman and his wife, artist and botanical enthusiast Helen O’Gorman.

About the O’Gormans

Juan O’Gorman (1905–1982) was a Mexican architect, painter and muralist known for his iconic modernist buildings and mosaic murals created using indigenous Mexican volcanic stone. Born and raised in Mexico City, he is credited with revolutionizing architecture in the country by designing Latin America’s first fully functionalist house in 1929. Awed by this structure, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo asked O’Gorman to build them joint home-studios next door in a similar style (these buildings now comprise Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo in San Angel, Mexico City). He continued his artistic partnership with Rivera and Kahlo, building Kahlo a studio at her childhood home, the Casa Azul (now Museo Frida Kahlo) and collaborating with Rivera on an exhibition space for his pre-Columbian artifacts (now Museo Anahuacalli). In addition to architecture and painting, O’Gorman was known for his mural work in Mexico and the US, most notably in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Castle and the central library at UNAM (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2007).

An advocate of socialism and a champion of Mexico’s underprivileged and indigenous peoples, O’Gorman built multiple schools and public works according to his functionalist principles. Over the course of his career, his style evolved to become more organic, surrealist and deeply rooted in Mexican iconography. O’Gorman’s blend of midcentury modern design with regional materials and aesthetics resulted in a uniquely Mexican style of architecture that continues to influence major names in the field today.

Helen Fowler O’Gorman (1904-1984) was an American-born sculptor, painter, landscape designer and botanical illustrator. She married Juan O’Gorman in 1940 and resided in Mexico until his death in 1982. In 1961, she published the seminal book on botany of the region, Mexican Flowering Trees & Plants, sometimes referred to as the “Mexican Audubon.” She crafted wild and robust gardens for the couple’s homes, working only with native trees and plants in conversation with her husband’s architecture. Helen O’Gorman’s personal letters, photographs, drawings and scrapbook materials make up the bulk of the Fundación’s archives and offer a rare window into the couple’s creative partnership.

Casa Cueva

The Foundation

The move to form Fundación O’Gorman is spearheaded by Helen and Juan O’Gorman’s descendants, along with a group of individual and institutional advisors from the worlds of art, architecture and historic preservation in Mexico and the US. Our goal is to establish a permanent O’Gorman Cultural Center and museum in Mexico City, ideally on the site of Casa Cueva. By restoring and reimagining this crown jewel of Mexican Modernist architecture, Museo Casa Cueva would provide an extraordinary home for the couple’s personal archives and would serve as the first institution dedicated explicitly to the preservation and study of the O’Gormans’ work.

Casa Cueva, their home in the Pedregal section of Mexico City, was widely considered to be the O’Gormans’ most important architectural achievement. Completed in 1954, the astounding house-studio was constructed around a naturally formed lava cave and covered in fantastical petromurals depicting prehispanic and Mexican iconography. Using rock sourced throughout the country, the home was a stunning feat of both engineering and artistic expression, hailed by critics at the time as the defining masterpiece of Juan O’Gorman’s career and one of Mexico’s most significant modernist buildings. Meanwhile, Helen O’Gorman translated her botanical studies into a wild and robust native garden–thus making the grounds of the home as culturally significant to Mexico as Casa Cueva itself. It was featured in numerous international periodicals and books, including a spread of photographs in LIFE Magazine.

For years, Casa Cueva was considered a lost wonder of Mexico’s architectural landscape. We now know that a significant percentage of it still exists, with the possibility of restoration.

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