The soul of individual nations dwells in the bodies of their buildings and the streets of their cities. It is there that the record of the social choices and political actions of their citizens is written in meticulous detail.

Mexico is no exception to this human cultural trajectory. It enjoys a remarkable architectural and urbanist legacy that vividly describes its national life over the last millennium. From the extravagant monuments of the Maya and the Aztec cultures to the record of its more normative colonial cities and buildings, the Mexican people have been prolific builders. Producing some of the most poetic and extraordinary objects and places in the Americas.

The record of Mexico’s Spanish architecture and urbanism is as notable as it is extensive. Hundreds of Mexican cities were founded under the imperial patronage of the Spanish Crown under the Laws of the Indies legislation. Impressive public buildings, churches, monasteries, government halls, palaces were also produced under royal patronage and reflected the enormity of the religious and political ambitions of the royal institutions that sponsored them.

Yet, beyond the monumentality of public buildings, the colonization project found its most profound architectural expression in the vast architectural fabric of the houses of common people. Most of these houses were modest in scope, as they were generated with the limited design and construction skills of uneducated and poor immigrants and built with very limited resources. The most common house forms introduced under the Laws of the Indies were the palace on the plaza and principal streets of new towns, and the patio house for every other residential application. 

The invention of the patio house in Europe originated with the Greeks. Its extensive use in the towns and cities of the Iberian Peninsula during the last two thousand years was the result of its adoption as a common house form by the Romans. For the early Spanish immigrants to the Americas, the knowledge base of these residential precedents was second nature. Their understanding of the importance of the patio house was not theoretical or analytical. This was indeed the common house form of the towns and villages they had left behind. They carried its use to Spanish America for the same practical reasons it had proved so consistently useful in the mother country since the colonizing days of the Roman Empire. 

In its purest form, the patio house presented a plain wall to the street that contained a single house behind it. Such houses were organized around an intimate open space open to the sky, relatively small in plan, typically between five and eight meters in either direction and often enlarged by attached arcades or galleries. These patios were carefully proportioned relative to the building masses around them in order to limit overlooking by neighbors and to maximize solar access. By their central location in plan, they functioned as an open-air living room, a garden extension to the public rooms of each house. Families gathered in them outdoors in the summer and in indoor living rooms, sitting rooms and dining rooms overlooking them in the winter. 

Modestly sized according to the needs of each family, patio houses were produced to fit small, compact urban lots. Their rooms were generally small in plan, but ample in section and fluidly interconnected en filade. They were inexpensive to build because they presented a very minor part of their fabric to the public realm. Their classical details were also sparingly used. Markers of the social status of each family, they were often placed strategically as ornamental elaborations of exterior and interior doorways, windows and other key architectural elements. Inwardly configured, patio houses provided a very high degree of privacy. Including protection from unwanted attention from neighbors and security from the threat of frontier violence. Yet, simply arrayed along streets, they almost always defined a public realm of deep character that expressed a sense of urbanity and community at the scale of a village, town or city. 

The great benefits of the patio house were not only social, but also environmental. Without access to elaborate technology or basic scientific knowledge, early settlers sought physical comfort by using the body of the buildings themselves as filters for moderating the climate. Fully enclosed patios protected residents from the noise and dirt of the adjacent streets. The high embodied mass of their exterior walls and the tree canopies in their patios limited the rise in temperature inside buildings, associated with direct sun exposure. Their landscape and fountains cooled the air, as their zaguans accelerated the movement of this cool air through the public and private rooms surrounding them. Generously sized and properly placed windows and doors were used for natural lighting and ventilation. Patio houses were originally, and still remain exemplary, examples of passive cooling and heating design.

How is it possible then, that common Mexican patio houses, produced by illiterate builders, are so beautifully simple, elegantly proportioned and constructed, so environmentally sensitive and so livable? The reasons are relatively simple and common to all traditional architecture. They lie in the very process of the production of vernacular architectural form.

A single builder designed and built the first patio house in every new colonial Mexican town. This house was derived from their memory of familiar home-country precedents and was adapted to the climate of its new location. Radical design departures were precluded by social convention, money shortages, material and technological limitations. This first house was simple, efficient, intelligent, yet modest in every way. 

The next builder experienced this house, admired it and repeated it, adjusting what they considered to be its design shortcomings in orientation, size of openings, size of rooms, nature of patio, kind of landscape, etc. They fit their new house design to their own client’s modest needs and imagined its form within a very narrow band of change from the original. This process of learning from precedent and gradually improving upon it was repeated innumerable times over decades and centuries. Until the design of the urban patio house reached such a high level in fitting human needs to social, natural and urban conditions that no further refinement in its form was possible or desirable. By common consent, this patio house design became a norm, a timeless model.

Adherence to this norm over the centuries has produced the superb housing fabric of dozens of historic Mexican towns, including Lagos de Moreno. As it has supported the very pleasant ways of life that such buildings and towns have made possible over the centuries for a remarkably large number of people. 
 
In recent decades, the process of producing architecture has strayed as far from its traditional roots as is imaginable. Countries like Mexico are attempting to become modernized by rejecting their entire cultural heritage and embracing foreign cultures of fashion mongering, where only architectural novelty carries any value at all. Nothing remembered matters and no design pattern, however familiar or meaningful, is ever repeated. As a matter of theory and practice, no person ever refines someone else’s ideas or work. There is no commonality of culture, only desperate lunges forward that generate precious little innovation while destroying traditional wisdom, urbanist and architectural character, social and economic capital and commonly held values.

The simplicity and frugality of means, the elegance and beauty of form, and the humanity and humility of life possible in a traditional Mexican patio house puts to shame current abstract development formulas and the rootless architectural modernism that is typically attached to them.

This impressive volume of research into the patio house by Tony Perez stands as a clarion call to the people of Mexico, and to the people of every other developing country in the world. They must pay attention to the traditional architectural riches of their country. They must carefully document and analyze them as precedents for new architecture. They must recover the wisdom of their national architectural and urbanist culture before it is too late. Their identity and their very way of life depend on it.

The book is also a useful document for architects, developers and public authorities in the United States. Our obsession with privacy at the single-family house scale has fueled a development industry that focuses almost exclusively on producing ever-larger houses on ever larger lots. This, more than any other, has been the principal reason for the suburban sprawl of the last two generations. We can learn from countries like Mexico that have practiced alternative ways of dealing with privacy in the design of their dwellings. For example, enclosing private space rather than amassing massive areas of yards, and using patio houses as a key ingredient of compact, diverse and walkable neighborhoods. 

This may be one way of finally managing to live poetically and sustainably within our means. Our identity and our very way of life also depend on it.

Pasadena, California
23 November 2011