At the end of 1958, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was received by “at least 100 architects” at the airport in Mexico. The German architect’s right-hand man, Gene Summers, traveled with him on the plane and recalled the episode many years later in an email to researcher Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez. “Mr. Bosch must have fixed it,” Summers wrote. Mies came to Mexico to tour the land on which the offices he was designing for the Bacardí distillery were to be built, commissioned by the company’s then-president, José María Bosch. There are hardly any documents or photos of Mies’ journey through the country. Because of this, some believe he never actually set foot in Mexico. The work remained, a two-story pavilion closed to the general public. EL PAÍS visited the only building designed by the German architect in Latin America.
“My ideal office is one where there are no departments, where everyone sees one another, bosses and employees alike,” wrote Bosch, Bacardi’s president from 1944 to 1976, when he commissioned Mies to build the company’s offices in Mexico. “I don’t know if I agree with such a provision,” the businessman asked. It must have been Mies because it’s what he designed for the company’s property in the municipality of Tultitlán, an industrial center in the greater Mexico City area. The realization was remotely monitored by the architect during the year that the works lasted.
The building is a dark prism floating meters from a busy highway. It is a two storey structure made of steel, glass and Mexican travertine marble. An immaculate space that demands silence and distance; a clean and geometric composition. Mies closed off the ground floor with panes of glass that allow a view of the outside in all directions. In the middle he placed two symmetrical staircases leading to the second floor. There are the desks – without walls, as Bosch wanted – some meeting rooms and a small bar.
Interior of the Bacardi offices in Tultitlán.Quetzalli Nicte Ha
Architect and critic Miquel Adrià points out that the work “has everything you would expect from a Mies building”: “The exposed steel structure, the bare ground floor. The height is very Miesian and the railing of the stairs”. “He said you can’t invent architecture every Monday morning. It’s a way of saying, “I do the architecture that I do, and that’s what I can do,” says Adrià. However, the architect points out a special feature of this building: “Mies came up with two very clear typologies, the tower and the pavilion. The difference between the two lies in the structural elements. This looks like a pavilion but if you see it in plan it would fit into the other typology of vertical building.”
When Bosch commissioned Mies to do the work, the German was already a construction-obsessed icon of modern architecture. He had designed the German Pavilion in Barcelona, considered by many to be his masterpiece; he had headed the Bauhaus, the school that laid the foundations for modern design; He lived in the United States, where he had already built the Farnsworth house near Chicago, the most prestigious house of the 20th century, and yet uninhabitable. He had also popularized a maxim that condenses his philosophy. The phrase “less is more”, write Anatxu Zabalbeascoa and Javier Rodríguez Marcos in Vidas Construdas, “has often served as a panacea to resolve the contradictions of a tense, complex, polyhedral and even ambiguous work, that is, immensely rich”.
Bosch wanted to expand the brand internationally and architecture was a means to achieve this. Almost at the same time as he commissioned the Tultitlán building, businessman Mies was requesting a headquarters for his operations center in Santiago de Cuba, where the distillery had been founded in 1867. It was an ambitious design, solved on a single floor, which became the cover of almost all architecture magazines. But with the Cuban Revolution and the nationalization of the company’s assets, Bacardi left the island and the building was never built. For some it was the most famous undeveloped design of modernism. Years later it was salvaged for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which Mies opened shortly before his death in 1968.
File photo of the exterior of the Bacardi offices. With kind approval
In the Caribbean country, all that remains of the distillery is the Bacardi Building, the island’s first high-rise building, built in the 1930s. “The company has always viewed architecture as part of its storytelling,” said architect Allan T. Sulman, presenting the book Building Bacardi: Architecture, Art & Identity, which explores the brand’s legacy in the discipline over the past century in America. In the book, Sulman analyzes work designed for the company by creators who “challenged the way enterprise architecture was done.” “Bacardi never defined style. On the contrary, they were very risky,” said the scientist.
In Tultitlán, the Mies building coexists with buildings by the Spanish architect Félix Candela, who went into exile in Mexico in 1939 and built most of his works in the country. The Madrid architect, 24 years younger than Mies, designed three buildings on the 30 hectares of the rum factory in the state of Mexico: the bottling plant, the dining room for the employees and the aging cellar. All three are light concrete structures with roofs in the shape of hyperbolic paraboloids or inverted umbrellas, inaugurated before 1971.
“A very happy contrast”, Adrià estimates, “between the geometric rigor of Mies – the black box with steel structures – and the more sinuous and organic shapes of the covers, especially by Félix Candela”. Adrià, who doesn’t know if the two got together and discussed their projects, clarifies that Candela wasn’t “on the same level” as Mies in the late 1950s. “Over time, we can see it as dialogue, but at the time, Candela was just someone who solved a problem. [La suya] it was not yet the work of the author”.
Interior of the bottling plant designed by Félix Candela. Quetzalli Nicote Ha
A little-known work
The only Mies van der Rohe building in Latin America is little known outside of specialist circles. In his research, Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez ventures a hypothesis about the reason: “Certainly it is largely due to the fact that he himself has discreetly but firmly informed the critics throughout his career which buildings should be discussed and which should not. In the last decade alone, the company has become more actively involved in disseminating the work and now receives around 5,000 invitation-only visitors each year.
In 2019, the multinational began the “revitalization” of works on the building to “reach the original colors with which it was reopened”, explains Carlos Felici, who heads the company’s External Affairs department. “All the blacks are applied, all the marble is polished to perfection, the camel color of the panels [de madera] it has been restored to its original state,” the engineer explains during a tour of the factory. The dynamic on a weekday is that of any office, except that employees cannot bring food or drinks to their desks.
Over the years, the company has made a few changes to the original design. For example, glass meeting rooms that can be dismantled have been added to the ground floor. Although some of the original armchairs have been preserved, most of the furniture – desks, chairs, curtains – has been modified. Adrià points out that “some air conditioners appeared on the roof that didn’t go very well with Mies’ aesthetics”. The architect believes the changes are “not fortunate, but not too serious either”. “There were times when it was a bit sad that the directors had no idea what a lousy building was. If you don’t understand it now, at least respect it,” says the critic. “The good news,” he says, “is that he survived.”
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