Camino Real Polanco
Ricardo Legorreta · Mexico City, Mexico · 1968
Ricardo Legorreta rejected the conventional high-rise hotel for the 1968 Olympics in favor of a low, sprawling composition of patios, walls, fountains and intensely colored planes. The building turns arrival and circulation into a sequence of courtyards and framed views influenced by Mexican convents and by Luis Barragán’s spatial sensibility. Artworks were integrated into the architecture from the beginning. Camino Real became one of Legorreta’s defining works and an international reference for a modern architecture that was unmistakably Mexican without relying on literal historic imitation.