Mesoamerican architecture is often encountered through its ruins, from stepped pyramids and ceremonial plazas reclaimed by the jungle to the remains of ancient cities buried beneath the colonial buildings erected over them, giving the impression that its architectural legacy belongs firmly to the past. Published by Phaidon, Mesoamerican Modern: Ancient Ideas in Contemporary Mexican Homes upends this notion, exploring how pre-Hispanic forms and spatial ideas continue to inform modern and contemporary architecture in Mexico. Written by Mexico City-based curator and journalist Su Wu, with photography by Luis Garvan and a foreword by chef Elena Reygadas, the book brings together sixteen remarkable homes across the country that draw on ancient knowledge to propose new ways of living, revealing a design movement as concerned with the future as with the past.
Mesoamerican Modern: Ancient ideas in Contemporary Mexican Homes, Phaidon. Book cover. Courtesy of Phaidon.
Casa Möbius, San Jerónimo, Mexico City. Photo © Luis Garvan.
In the office sits a monumental inlaid desk by Don Shoemaker, sourced from Emmanuel Picault’s Mexico City gallery, Chic by Accident. The wooden chair, reissued by Clásicos Mexicanos, was originally designed in 1953 by the German-born Mexican artist Mathias Goeritz for the Museo Experimental el Eco. Goeritz—who collaborated with Barragán on the public artwork Torres de Satélite in Mexico City—conceived the museum as a prototype of “emotional architecture,” understood not merely as a set of formal principles, but as a lived condition shaped through use and experience.
Mesoamerican Modern: Ancient ideas in Contemporary Mexican Homes, Phaidon. Interior spread featuring Casa Möbius, Mexico City. Courtesy of Phaidon.
Spanning central Mexico and parts of Central America, Mesoamerica was home to sophisticated civilisations over millennia, from the Olmecs and Zapotecs to the Maya and Mexica. Some disappeared long before Europeans arrived; others endured conquest and its devastation. Colonial churches and palaces rose atop Indigenous structures, sometimes using their stones, as European aesthetic conventions were imposed on the built environment. Yet influence also flowed in the other direction. As Wu recounts, urban historian Fernando Luiz Lara argues that the monumental avenues and gridded cities of the Americas helped shape European urbanism, while the Mayan Revival brought Mesoamerican forms into modern architecture in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, often without acknowledging their origins.
A century later, Mexico is at the centre of a wide-ranging design movement spanning architecture, interiors and furniture. Its architects and designers place Indigenous principles on equal footing with modern ideas, drawing on Mesoamerican forms, materials, building techniques and spatial concepts not as historical motifs to replicate, but as sources of inspiration for contemporary living. What unites their diverse approaches is a willingness to challenge inherited notions of beauty and utility, while reconciling cultural heritage with personal expression. As poet Octavio Paz observed, “To be truly modern, we must first come to terms with our tradition.”
Casa 720, Valle de Bravo, Estado de México. Photo © Luis Garvan.
The home appears sunken into the ground by virtue of its activated roof areas. It seems to face outward during the day and glow inward with warmth and safety at night, when the forest beyond becomes what the homeowner once called “una boca de lobo”—as shadowy as a wolf’s mouth.
Casa del Ojo de Agua, Tepoztlán, Morelos. Photo © Luis Garvan.
A saddle blanket with a motif of a startled deer and a painting of a scarlet macaw (native to Mexico) lend vivacity to a corner of the small study.
Casa Möbius, San Jerónimo, Mexico City. Photo © Luis Garvan.
A framed photograph by Perla’s father, the award-winning war photographer Pedro Valtierra, hangs near cast aluminum side tables made from melted-down soda cans, by Barcelona-born, Mexico City–based designer Pol Agustí. The platinum-glazed bowl is by Austrian-born, Beninbased ceramics artist Matthias Kaiser.
The book is as much a labour of love as a work of architectural research, shaped by the close collaboration between Wu and Garvan, who travelled together to every one of its sixteen homes. Their meetings with the people who conceived and inhabit these spaces lend the book an intimacy rarely found in architectural surveys. Wu’s accompanying essays go beyond conventional descriptions to illuminate the inspirations and personal convictions behind each home, while Garvan’s evocative photographs capture the nuances of inhabiting them. Taken mostly at daybreak, a choice Wu credits to Garvan’s perceptive insistence, they reveal the swift passage of morning light across rooms, courtyards and textured surfaces, offering a fleeting sense of what it might actually feel like to live in these spaces.
Few homes in the book embody the meeting of invention and inheritance as vividly as Casa Reyes Fernández in Mexico City’s Coyoacán neighbourhood, conceived by artist Pedro Reyes and fashion designer Carla Fernández as their home and studio. Behind its imposing concrete exterior, a progression of courtyards and intimate passages opens into a soaring living room of monumental stone steps, bookshelves and planting beds. Fernández wanted a distinctly Mexican home rather than simply a Brutalist one, a conviction apparent in the flagstone floor painstakingly assembled over nearly two years into an organic, jigsaw-like pattern. For Reyes, the house imagines “counterfactual scenarios” of how local architecture might have evolved without colonial intervention.
Casa Reyes Fernández, Coyoacán, Mexico City. Photo © Luis Garvan.
A view of the bedroom, surrounded by Reyes’s large-scale artworks on amate, the paper used by the Aztec empire for contracts, recordkeeping, and codices. Next to the window hangs a row of shovels from the artist’s project Palas por Pistolas, in which he asked residents of the state of Sinaloa to trade in firearms, which were then communally melted and recast into tools.
Casa Reyes Fernández, Coyoacán, Mexico City. Photo © Luis Garvan.
At the heart of the living room is an area for gathering and conversation raised on a stepped platform. The expanse is decorated with both traditional Mexican furniture and chairs of Reyes’s design, including stone seats in the form of a metate, the curved mortar used for grinding corn. Instead of a cushion, the back of the tripod chair is fashioned in the shape of a metlapil rolling pin, a shift in the scale and function of a centuries-old form
Casa Bernal, San Sebastián Bernal, Querétaro. Photo © Luis Garvan.
Functional clay comal surfaces act as incidental decoration in the kitchen, which also has a floating gas range recalling the kitchen in Frida Kahlo’s functionalist studio, designed by Juan O’Gorman.
Casa Bernal, San Sebastián Bernal, Querétaro. Photo © Luis Garvan.
Woven palm petate mats and vernacular folding chairs known as sillas de tijeras surround the pool at Casa Bernal. The taborets made of bound bundles of tule (tolli in Náhuatl) are by txt.ure, a design project founded by Regina Pozo, former chief curator of Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura in Mexico City.
Mesoamerican Modern: Ancient ideas in Contemporary Mexican Homes, Phaidon. Interior spread featuring Casa Bernal, San Sebastián Bernal, Querétaro. Courtesy of Phaidon.
Casa Pedregal, El Pedregal, Mexico City. Photo © Luis Garvan.
The entry of the house features a staircase that follows Mesoamerican proportions, and a satisfying shared thickness of material across stone and sabino wood. Cervantes chose the furniture to respect Barragán’s decorating proclivities and collaborations with artesanos, including a mouthblown mercury glass lamp from Jalisco that reflects and contains the room within itself.
The same could be said for architect Carlos Matos’ Casa Monte on Oaxaca’s Pacific coast, whose pyramid-like silhouette is constructed from more than 1,500 individually cast concrete forms. Raised above the sandy beach on a plinth that, as Matos puts it, “separates living areas from nature just slightly”, the house dispenses with exterior doors altogether.
This deliberate blurring of boundaries between indoors and outdoors, a recurring principle in Mesoamerican architecture, finds an even bolder expression at Casa del Ojo de Agua in Tepoztlán. At architect Sergio Puente’s riverside retreat, three sides of the main living space are enclosed by fine mesh rather than glass, creating a sense of immersion among the treetops, with the constant sound of two waterfalls providing a natural soundtrack.
Light, meanwhile, acquires almost architectural substance in Luis Barragán’s Casa Pedregal, set on an ancient lava field in Mexico City’s Jardines del Pedregal. Wu acknowledges that its inclusion was debated: Barragán never explicitly identified Mesoamerican architecture as an influence. Yet his use of volcanic stone, choreographed light and deliberately empty space suggests an affinity with Indigenous conceptions of the void.
Mesoamerican Modern: Ancient ideas in Contemporary Mexican Homes, Phaidon. Interior spread featuring Casa Pedregal, Mexico City. Courtesy of Phaidon.
“To be truly modern, we must first come to terms with our tradition.” - Octavio Paz
Mesoamerican Modern: Ancient ideas in Contemporary Mexican Homes, Phaidon. Interior spread. Courtesy of Phaidon.
Mesoamerican geometry finds an especially inventive expression in Casa Amalia, architect Agustín Hernández’s sculptural home for his sister in Lomas de Santa Fé, shaped around the profile of an Indigenous face, with spiral stairs ascending towards an eye-shaped window. In a different register, the distinction between art, craft and architecture dissolves at Tlalocan, near Teotihuacán, where Gerardo “Geraz” García Rodríguez continues a family undertaking, carving the walls of his home with elaborate imagery that makes ancient iconography intensely personal. Even buildings inherited from colonialism and European Modernism become sites of reinterpretation. At Casa Nancarrow in Mexico City, architect Juan O’Gorman covered the austere walls of his earlier functionalist design with mosaics of natural stone gathered across Mexico.
Tlalocan, Teotihuacán, Estado de México. Photo © Luis Garvan.
A wall relief depicting a mythological owl with a butterfly body, Geraz’s representation of a motif that decorates columns in the central patio in the Palace of Quetzalpapálotl. According to the artist, the image is thought to symbolize rebirth in its union of Mesoamerican figures of death and transformation.
Tlalocan, Teotihuacán, Estado de México. Photo © Luis Garvan.
Rather than reproductions, Geraz and Don Marino have created an irreverent narrative from Mesoamerican motifs, iconographies, and deities. For example, the top corner of a bas relief mural depicts ancient immigration across the lakes, when craftspeople came in search of work and established ethnic and trade-based enclaves, like this neighborhood near the current town center of Teotihuacán, settled by albañiles (masons) from present-day Oaxaca. So, too, is the Tláloc sculpture here in its process of creation an object that traveled, from its original site in Texcoco to Mexico City. After “heated negotiations between unequal parties,” the inhabitants of Coatlinchán agreed to exchange the monumental stone, “an object from its landscape—a part of its sense of place—for a school, a clinic, a road, and two wells,” as anthropologist Sandra Rozental writes, exchanging its past for the promise of modernity
Mesoamerican Modern: Ancient ideas in Contemporary Mexican Homes, Phaidon. Interior spread featuring Casa Flora, Merida, Yucatan. Courtesy of Phaidon.
Mesoamerican Modern evocatively recasts architectural heritage as something kept alive through the everyday act of living, far removed from both the museum vitrine and the faithful replica. As Wu discovered, what she had expected to be a history was instead “the vibrant, living presence of Indigenous ideas in Mexico”, a compelling reminder that Mesoamerican design has never belonged exclusively to the past.
Mesoamerican Modern: Ancient ideas in Contemporary Mexican Homes, Phaidon. Courtesy of Phaidon.
Mesoamerican Modern: Ancient Ideas in Contemporary Mexican Homes, by Su Wu, photographed by Luis Garvan, Phaidon.