1. Eduardo Terrazas Biographical Profile
Eduardo Terrazas was born in the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco in 1936. Three months after
his birth, his family, originally from northern Mexico, relocated to Mexico City. During his years
of professional training as an architect (1953-1958), the National Autonomous University of
Mexico was transferred from the San Carlos Academy, located in the historic downtown area of
Mexico City, to the new University City campus south of the capital. There, Terrazas came into
contact with a whole new generation of teachers determined to rethink what kind of architecture
Mexico required. The Revolution of 1910 had permanently altered the conditions under which
architecture would develop, given that the national agenda was built around the search for
solutions to collective problems that had arisen from the country’s social needs. These men
dedicated their pedagogical activity towards the definition of a national architecture based on
actual social demands and aspirations.
This focus on Mexican architecture during Terrazas’ years of study decisively influenced
not only his career as an architect, but his artistic endeavors as well. The social orientation of his
work is manifested as a conscious drive to recover and renovate multiple creative expressions in
Mexico. One of the main focal points of Terrazas’ artistic career has been the appropriation of
elements belonging to the Mexican artisan tradition and national folk art culture and establishing
a constant dialogue between them and different trends in contemporary art. Through this dialogue
Terrazas opened up a permanent process of renovation and evolution of both traditions. However,
his perspective was already very different from that which, stemming from the Revolution,
proposed to depict national life under the ideological framework that characterized Mexican
muralism in the early 20th
century. Terrazas began his approach to artistic language as an end in
itself and for him, as for many artists of his generation, the language of art is, more than anything,
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2. a set of formal challenges to be explored rather than a bearer of representation.
Upon completing his degree at the National School of Architecture, he began a long
period of studies and work outside Mexico that would significantly broaden the horizon of his
knowledge and interests in the visual arts beyond architecture. This period of more than five
years would take him to the United States, Italy, Russia, Poland, England and France. First, he
obtained his Master’s degree in Architecture from Cornell University, where he took Art History
classes with the Pop-art theorist Alan Solomon, who introduced him to the basics of art history.
Within the intellectual environment at Cornell, the borders between architecture, urbanism, and
art began to vanish, above all under the influence of his mentors John Reps –an urban planner
and historian of urban planning-, John Hejduk –an artist, architect and pedagogue- and Robert
Slutzky, a painter, writer and architectural theorist.
After a brief stay in Mexico, Terrazas embarked for Europe and headed for Rome, where
he studied under Pier Luigi Nervi for a short time and worked as an extra at Cinecittà. His stay in
Rome in the early 1960s, a city with intense artistic and intellectual activity, would wield a strong
influence over Eduardo’s career, and it was there, in the artistic circle surrounding the Via
Margutta –famous for its numerous contemporary art galleries- that he came into contact with the
European avant-gardes. This contact caused him great admiration and amazement and thus he
began to question himself, to experiment and to paint. His approach to art began with the
production of works based on autonomous principles and corresponding techniques and laws
with no external references. In this context, in which the visual arts encompassed architecture as
well as design and urbanism (De Stijl, Bauhaus), Terrazas adopted the formal investigation of
space in aesthetic terms as part of a search for harmony and visual rhythm and, progressively, as
a means of building a socially functional city environment. His artistic activity during this
multidisciplinary stage was strongly linked to a sense of social responsibility, in that he
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3. conceived his activity as being tied to the search of a formal language that would reveal what is at
stake for contemporary urban society and will allow him to design applied strategies within the
new social order he perceived. A decade later, in the 1970s, he co-edited with Raymundo Cuervo
The Industry of Deconstruction, a work that they had prepared for the Habitat Forum -a United
Nations conference on human settlements- intended to become an analytical instrument for the
underlying issues faced by contemporary life. But this would happen later on, when he was
Technical Director of the National Institute for the Development of Community and Popular
Housing (Indeco), as well as part of the Institute of Urban Action and Social Integration (Auris)
and an advisor to the Ministry of Human Settlements and Public Infrastructure. Let us return to
the previous decade.
Still in Rome, Eduardo answered -through the Mexican embassy in Italy- the call of
Fernando Gamboa, a Mexican museographer, who was in need of an assistant to mount the
exhibition Masterpieces of Mexican Art, which was being installed at the time, in 1961, at the
Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. This great exhibition of pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern art
from Mexico, which also included an abundant variety of Mexican crafts from the entire nation,
had a big impact on his European journey. When Terrazas arrived in Leningrad, he discovered
the quality, refinement and beauty of Mexican art and the effect was profound. Terrazas was able
to admire firsthand and as a whole, a representative set of folk art production from Mexico and a
series of pieces that, at the time, as the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico did not exist yet,
were only known partially or through photographs. Together with Fernando Gamboa, Terrazas
learned not only to mount an exhibition, but also to value and present a collection of works that
embodied the artistic and creative richness of his native country. Following the Leningrad show,
Terrazas traveled by train with the entire collection to Poland in order to present it at the National
Museum of Warsaw, where he again contributed to the exhibition mounting and design. From
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4. Warsaw, Terrazas headed to London, invited by a friend from Cornell, and there he worked at the
architectural firm Howell, Killick, Partridge & Amis. During his stay in London, Fernando
Gamboa invited him to collaborate once again by mounting the exhibition Masterpieces of
Mexican Art at the Petit Palais in Paris, with a catalogue written by Raquel Tibol, that was
inaugurated by General Charles de Gaulle in the spring of 1962.
Terrazas decided to stay and live in Paris in order to complete his studies on
prefabrication at the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment, where he met George
Candilis, an architect, urban planner and one of the closest collaborators of Le Corbusier, who
invited him to join his staff at Candilis, Josic & Woods. It was there that Terrazas first came into
contact with the members of Team X, helping in the organization of their meeting at Royaumont
in 1962. While in France, Terrazas also became acquainted with the French artistic movements of
the time through the galleries René Drouin, Maeght and Denise René, where exhibitions were
held on New Realism, Concrete Art, Art Brut, and Informal Art with works by Dubuffet, Fautrier,
Wolf, Ernst, Miró, Picabia, Soto, Mata and Cruz Diez, among others.
This experience outside Mexico, studying and working, enriched by his discovery of both
the artisanry and masterpieces of Mexican art and the European and American artistic movements
of the time, left a lasting mark on his work and gave him a deeper understanding of his country.
When Terrazas returned to Mexico, he met architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, who proposed that
he become the Mexican commissioner at the New York World’s Fair of 1964-1965 and thus he
was entrusted the building of the Mexican Pavilion. Soon after having arrived in New York, he
received an invitation to join Columbia University as a professor, where he taught at the
architectural design workshop. In New York, he found himself again in a city with intense artistic
life and met architects, painters and designers with whom he visited the major museums and art
galleries. Before returning to Mexico, Terrazas worked with the architect and designer George
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5. Nelson. Doubtless, during his New York residence, Terrazas broadened his experience and his
knowledge of architecture, art, and design.
It was then, that architect Ramírez Vázquez, at the time President of the Organizing
Committee for the 19th
Olympic Games, invited him to be the artistic director of the event, with
the objective of making Mexico known throughout the world, inform about the preparations,
advances and activities prior to the Olympics and designing an urban environment tailored to
Mexico City. Given that these were the first Olympic Games organized by a developing country,
the task was particularly challenging, because it was of great importance to show that Mexico
was not only capable of rising to the occasion but also to contribute meaningfully to the Olympic
tradition. To that end, Ramírez Vázquez brought him on board the Organizing Committee,
together with Beatriz Trueblood -a major editor in New York who, in 1965, had published in
Mexico a book about the recently inaugurated Museum of Anthropology-, and bit by bit, working
as a team, they shaped the Program of Olympic Identity and Design, composed by the
Department of Ornament and Urban Design, under the direction of Terrazas, and the Department
of Publications, under the direction of Beatriz Trueblood.
Through the Program of Olympic Identity and Design, intended to showcase a modern
Mexico of great historical richness, Terrazas and Trueblood succeeded in bringing together the
Mexican long standing cultural traditions and contemporary visual arts in a project that became a
landmark in graphic design. The logo for the event, designed by Terrazas and Lance Wyman, was
inspired by a technique used by the Huichols –an ethnic group from northern Mexico- consisting
on colored wool yarn stuck with wax over wooden boards. This technique, which the Huichols
use to represent their cosmological vision, creates images based on concentric and ever-
expanding lines (the yarn being simultaneously line and brush). The team gradually grew thanks
to the invited designers, layout artists, writers and editors, some from abroad, who, under the
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6. guidance of Terrazas and Trueblood, produced over 16 million prints; selected the ornamentation
and urban structures for Mexico City (posts, banners, maps); decorated sporting venues and
public buildings (balloons, judas figures, banners, logotype sculptures, olympic cauldron);
designed urban furniture (booths, screens, posts, billboards, signs); and created five systems of
symbols: one for Services, one for Sports, one for the Cultural Olympics events, one for Arenas
& Tickets, and one for the Official Olympics Program. The entire Program of Olympic Identity
and Design was part of the XIV Milan Triennale in 1968 with a pavilion designed by Terrazas,
who created a tridimensional-architectural version of the Mexican Olympics logo, offering inside
an exhibition with a complete view of how Mexico was organizing to host the grand scale event.
The official poster of the Olympic Games was chosen by Mildred Constantine for the graphic arts
exhibition Word and Image that she organized at the MOMA in 1968.
Terrazas’ work for the Games was not over after the competitions had ended; throughout
1969, Terrazas and Trueblood continued working at the offices of Ramírez Vázquez, where they
edited the Olympic Memoirs, a series of five volumes that account for all aspects of the event.
That same year, Terrazas worked on the exhibition Imagen Mexico, for the inauguration
of the Mexico City subway system. Presented all along the first line of the subway, was a vast
visual display that offered an integral image of the country; there were numerous photographs,
some solarized and painted, that showed all of Mexico’s diversity -flora, fauna, industry, crafts,
transportation, agriculture, ethnic groups, etc.-, installed in the light boxes along the hallways and
in the future advertising spaces positioned on the platforms. A special poster was designed with
the words “Imagen Mexico” printed on mirrored paper intended to reflect back the spectator’s
image. This poster was also included by Mildred Constantine in one of her renowned graphic art
exhibitions at the MoMA in New York. The peak of this exhibition, at the grand Insurgentes
Avenue roundabout, was an enormous serigraph mural covering the periphery of the plaza,
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7. depicting Mexico City’s urban life in lifesize format, where spectators and mural blended. Also
in the plaza, one could go into the future commercial premises and experience the first
multimedia exhibition in Mexico; in each one, there was a wall of 15 screens that showed the
images of the nation to the beat of music by mexican composers Moncayo and Revueltas, joining
the images together at times to form a single image or dividing them into infinite intermittent
mosaics. A year later, in 1970, Terrazas mounted for the Federal Electric Commission (CFE) a
kinetic spectacle in a similar vein, syncronizing electronic music and Bach compositions with 48
projectors that explored the phenomenon of light. Both the subway and the CFE exhibitions were
accomplished in collaboration with the engineer Gustavo Cota. That same year, Terrazas
designed the logo of the 1970 World Soccer Cup held in Mexico.
Between 1969 and 1971, Terrazas also worked as a professor giving two seminars at the
University of California at Berkeley, Limits to do and The ruralization of the urban and a seminar
entitled The intense use of space at the CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación) founded
in Cuernavaca, Mexico by Ivan Illich, with whom he established a long standing friendship.
During that period, Terrazas was already experimenting with geometry, playing with the
formal relationships between graphic elements in countless drawings. He designed abstract
geometrical works that he then produced in the Huichol technique (yarn stuck with wax on wood
boards) with Santos de la Torre, a Huichol who he invited to share his home, and together they
learned to elaborate Terrazas’ geometric patterns using this technique. Thus began the production
of works that compose the series Tablas which was exhibited in May 1972 at the Palace of Fine
Arts in Mexico City, with the backing and enthusiasm of Jorge Hernández Campos, a poet who
was, at the time, head of the Department of Visual Arts of the National Institute of Fine Arts.
Hernández Campos had already taken Terrazas’ Olympic balloons to the 6th
Paris Biennale in
1969 as curator of the Mexican pavilion, and afterwards, following a visit to Terrazas’ studio
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8. -along with Rufino Tamayo- he decided to exhibit the entire series Tablas along with the series
Deconstruction of an Image, where large wood frames examine the fragility of a total, unique
image through a construction based on parallel lines, which can be dismembered into pieces that
are itself autonomous, while conserving the memory of the set from which they emerged.
The series Possibilities of a Structure began after this period in an endeavor to
systematize these formal games; the structure Terrazas had chosen would prove, over the
following ten years, to be an unending source of visual exploration. During the 1970s, he
dedicated himself to architecture and urban planning, while at the same time assembling a major
archive of works, publications and exhibitions. The pieces he had exhibited at the Palace of Fine
Arts toured South America -Chile and Venezuela- with an important addendum: his balloons.
Since 1967, Terrazas had begun to explore the sculptural qualities of the balloon through the
installation of an enormous, translucid globe in the Zócalo or Main Square of Mexico City and,
during the Olympics, he multiplied its applications and uses. Later on, in the 1970s, he produced
several series of balloon-sculptures in different formats, colors and geometric patterns that
playfully delved into the space around them and interacted with the light and the spectators.
In 1975, together with Arnaldo Coen, Terrazas mounted the exhibition Without knowing it
existed and unable to explain it at the Benjamin Franklin Library gallery. This exhibition turned
out to be the starting point for a series of works and actions oriented towards broadening our gaze
by revealing the creativity and expressiveness of urban popular art. The interest of both artists
centered on revealing the aesthetic value of the commercial tactics visible in the shop windows of
downtown Mexico City. They proposed that local shop owners transfer their display cases to the
art gallery and fourteen of them agreed to participate, showing off their powerful commercial
displays. Through this gesture of dislocation, Coen and Terrazas wanted to show the full potential
of their direct discourse, both playful and overwhelming, in the very act of battling for the
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9. consumer gaze. This exhibition achieved a clear approach to two worlds: the commercial world
of the street, and the commercial world of the art gallery, placing them on the same level and
leaving it to our consideration to compare and linger over the strategies that come into play in
gallery and shopwindow staging, with regards to the appreciation of the products being offered
and their assigned value. This action generated, moreover, an exceptional publication that
reproduced the photographs Terrazas had taken of these display cases, printed in the style of
mexican wrestling posters. The images were accompanied by short, playful texts written by
Terrazas and Coen in collaboration with writer Gustavo Sainz who, using aphorisms and quotes
taken out of context, synthesized the artists’ attitude towards the phenomenon of shop window
display in the nation’s capital.
That same year, Terrazas was asked to create a publication and an exhibition to
accompany the meeting of the Club of Rome, an international interdisciplinary think tank
founded in 1968 by Aurelio Peccei with the objetive of studying and analyzing the future
challenges faced by humanity. This meeting, held in Guanajuato, Mexico in 1975, was organized
by Victor Urquidi, a Mexican economist member of the Club of Rome, and Luis Echeverría,
former President of the Mexico. The task included the creation of visual material to render the
Club of Rome’s report both intelligible and eloquent. The result was a codex-like publication
entitled Solidarity for Peace and Development containing graphics, images and photographs that
picture the “predicament of mankind” as published in the two reports of the Club of Rome; The
Limits to Growth of 1972 and Mankind at the Turning Point of 1974, along with a compendium
of the historical development of the world and humanity and its situation at that time. The Codex
also included a design of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, which President
Luis Echeverría had proposed at the United Nations Assembly. A selection of the material from
the Codex was then produced to be exposed in an exhibition entitled Everything Depends on
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10. Everything which included works that Terrazas had produced, once more on the threshold
between art and design, in order to visualize very specific concepts, including the series
Exponential Growth & Organic Growth.
From that point onwards, Terrazas’ scope of activity expanded considerably and his
former interest in integrated research regarding human modes of dwelling gave rise to urban and
regional planning. Having already experienced urban design for the Olympics in Mexico City,
Terrazas traveled to Tanzania as the Director of Technical Assistance provided by the Mexican
government through the Ministry of Human Settlements and Public Infrastructure for the
development of a master plan for Dodoma, the new capital of Tanzania. The summary of ideas
from this experience triggered the publication Dodoma is not a city. Dodoma is a capital. Upon
returning from Africa, he was charged with the design of urban furnishing, signaling and public
space for the boulevards known as Axes in Mexico City (1978-1979), that included: an integrated
signaling system, circulation structure, sidewalk design, street lighting and maps, synchronized
traffic lights as well as the landscape design, hedges and trees. In all of the numerous urban
planning projects he has designed across Mexico (Monterrey, Tampico, Guanajuato, State of
Mexico, among others), Terrazas implemented his studies of social spaces, community
development, and the possibilities for movement and rhythm in the public sphere.
In 1980, Eduardo Terrazas along with economist Victor Urquidi, founded the Tepoztlán
Center, which since then has periodically held meetings between academics and intellectuals,
Mexicans and foreigners, with the objective of creating a dialogue for the analysis of themes that
are fundamental to Mexico and Latin America. Through seminars, this group of economists,
politicians, sociologists, historians and anthropologists, where Terrazas is the only architect, form
a multidisciplinary environment in order to address contemporay issues.
At the same time, his artistic activity changed substantially as his work as an architect and
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11. urban planner intensified and multiplied. It was as if the geometry had been transferred to
regional layouts and architectural blueprints, and in their place, he created organic acrylics and
drawings that saturate space with the successive rhythm of multiplication. His work from the
1980s is marked by this meticulous gazing at elements that are isolated and repeated in reiterative
sequences, as if only persistent representation would allow us to capture their unique qualities.
This exercise in visual reiteration was not limited to his work on paper, which is very
abundant during that period. It also appears in his Multiplications, which are works that draw
upon all kinds of everyday life objects procured mainly in Mexican markets. The market
continually fascinates Terrazas as a space for creativity: the positioning of products; the
arrangement of stalls; the organization by zones, colors, and smells; all what Terrazas has dubbed
the intense layout. In these works, a single common daily object is repeated in compositions or
multiplications that intensify the saturation of space. Every set achieves the effect of emphasizing
the details that make every piece a unique work where assembly, repetition, superimposition,
accumulation and the incrustation of an object over itself devoids it of its daily function and
transforms it into a symbol of itself, an emblem, an image. Consequence of this fascination are
the exhibitions Everyday Museum at OMR Gallery and Multiplications at Mobil Oil’s offices in
Mexico.
During the 1990s, Terrazas continued to focus on the numerous urban planning and
architectural projects that he was developing nationwide, to which he dedicated most of his
energy. When he took up painting again, at the beginning the new century, his output was entirely
new. He has added to the accumulation and multiplication of elements, a practice from his
previous work, a highly physical confrontation with large format canvases to which he
successively applies and removes materials in an intensification of layers and strata. This reflects
a long gestation process during which the work is substantially and gradually transformed as
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12. actions are added and subtracted while showing in the end, traces of itself, of the changes it has
experienced and of all the complex strata that compose it. The use of acrylics and canvases in this
most recent stage is far from being exhausted and his production continues, as always, in parallel
to his multidisciplinary life.
Nuria Castañeda
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