MYSTERIOUS PLEASURES

Since first visiting Hotel Camino Real, I return every now and then to wander the space in my mind. Designed by Ricardo Legorreta and developed in anticipation of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the hotel’s spaces seem not entirely real. Bordering on the uncanny, Camino Real abandons the proportions and sequences we’ve come to expect from buildings with its sleek Modernist roots. Instead, its spaces unfold through a series of seeming contradictions and tensions, pulled together to sublime effect. They are, say: grand but with low ceilings; dim but roiling with rich colors; expansive yet intimate. Enormous artworks fill the walls in unexpected locations and, in long hallways past the reception, always, on my multiple visits, the hotel has seemed deserted, absent of other guests even during times of high occupancy.

The pleasure of Camino Real lies in its ability to upset expectations: “Buildings that are given to us all at once,” wrote Legorreta in his 1990 monograph The Architecture of Ricardo Legorreta, “do not give us the happiness of mystery.” This enigmatic quality extends from the unexpected manner in which Camino Real’s spaces unfold to the way the project intertwines a web of artists and designers to deliver a scheme directed at the Olympic-era jetset. Between the monumental and recently rediscovered Anni Albers artwork which once hung in the Lobby Bar, the thrashing, whirlpool-like fountain persistently misattributed to Isamu Noguchi, and the bold graphic identity crafted by Lance Wyman, designer of the iconic Mexico City Olympics logo, a constellation of notable names — also including Luis Barragán, Alexander Calder, and Knoll — intersect at Camino Real — and yet it remains outside the circuit of sites frequented by the art- and design-inclined tourists driving Mexico City’s current wave of gentrification.

Long surpassed as the height of luxury in the capital, there’s mystery too in Camino Real’s faded glory: bustling and intact as a total work of art, graced by royalty, astronauts, presidents, and movie stars, what feeling did Camino Real transmit at its height? And now, still remarkable but overlooked, what will become of it?

In the lead up to Latin America’s first Games, Legorreta, then in his mid 30s, designed Camino Real in a moment of personal transformation that he later recalled as an “enormous existential crisis.” After a decade of working for his mentor José Villagrán García, a designer of rigid functionalist buildings, Legorreta received the commission in the first years of running his own studio while recovering from a near fatal bout of pancreatitis. In an extended 2011 interview published as the book El verdadero lujo está en el espacio, the prolific architect described the development of Camino Real as a catharsis of sorts: “A revelation of freedom came to me […] it was my moment to be Ricardo Legorreta: I did the project in my house, convalescent, and I thought, now’s the time: ¡Viva México! I’m going to do what I want.”

With its planes of textured plaster bathed in magenta and marigold yellow, cloistered gardens, and sculptural lattices, the architecture born of Legorreta’s burst of freedom bears an immediate resemblance to the work of Mexico’s most famous Modern architect, Luis Barragán. Like Barragán, Legorreta pursued a poetic design language inspired by the country’s vernacular architecture. Pre-Colombian and colonial architecture were, at Camino Real and across Legorreta’s career, sources of sensory-rich memories that he attempted to infuse into modern forms. In writings and interviews, he often recalled the vast, labyrinthine spaces of colonial architecture that he visited from his childhood onward. Like Barragán, Legorreta came from a wealthy landowning family and romanticized haciendas with an admiration uncomplicated by the history of colonization and exploitation otherwise entangled in these sites: “I didn’t want to make a caricature of a hacienda, but rather create the same environment of ‘Mexicanness,’ dignified privacy, with mystery and romanticism.”

While Camino Real has often been compared to a museum, art inhabits its spaces differently than in an institutional setting. Neither lone protagonists as in a gallery, nor decorative backdrops, artworks are integral to the architecture. Carefully scaled to each space and strategically located, they function as both enticements to explore and anchors for gathering — inviting the lone visitor to linger and the group to collect. Rufino Tamayo’s silhouette of a human figure against a marbled, cosmic backdrop is the first thing one sees, in the distance, upon entering the hotel. Located at the far end of a large, deep room, El hombre frente al infinito (1971) grounds an island of seating amidst a sea of polished wood inlay and marble. This first lobby also offers a peek of the wall-size, gold expanse of Mathias Goeritz’s Abstracto en oro (1968). With a craggy metallic surface perforated by thousands of small holes, it occupies a vestibule all to itself at the top of a broad set of stairs. Ascending the steps, Goeritz’s work grows larger until it occupies your whole field of vision: “I wanted to have the sun inside the building,” recalls Legorreta of its golden aura.

With disappearances and reappearances, voids and patches left over the years, artworks contribute to the intrigue of Camino Real even in their absence. For decades, a six-legged Alexander Calder stabile stood at the center of a vestibule beyond Abstracto en oro. Seen in photos before it was sold at auction in 2003, the sculpture appears perfectly fitted to the square room. With the apex of its sheet metal nearly grazing the ceiling, one can imagine passersby circling its crimson legs on their way to and from restaurants and meetings. Today, bulky chairs, a halo of pendant lights, and a Starbucks-branded coffee bar have taken the place of the sculpture which now belongs to the Berardo Collection in Portugal.

The most notable phantom artwork of the hotel, though, is likely the nine-foot tall Anni Albers wall hanging commissioned for the Lobby Bar. Titled Camino Real after the development, the work remained unlocatable by experts for several decades until the writer Carla Zarebska described the piece to a hotel employee when preparing a history of the hotel on its 50th anniversary. Found rolled up in one of the hotel’s unassuming storerooms, Albers’ mythical piece, a sea of triangle appliqués on a red felt background evoking a landscape of mountain peaks or, given Albers’s love for pre-Colombian design, Central American pyramids. Found rolled up in one of the hotel’s unassuming storerooms, Albers’ mythical piece consists of a sea of triangle appliqués on a red felt background that evokes a landscape of mountain peaks or, given Albers’s love for pre-Colombian design, Central American pyramids. After undergoing an extensive restoration by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura in Mexico City, Camino Real was briefly displayed in the hotel before quietly departing for a series of international exhibitions culminating in its acquisition by the Glenstone private contemporary art museum in Potomac, Maryland. Considering the dislocation of yet another small piece of Camino Real, I look back at 1970s photos of the Lobby Bar and imagine the fabric as a neatly excavated portal into the sanguine tissue of the hotel itself.

Crossing a threshold beyond the reception, the private areas of Camino Real exude a stillness both eerie and attractive. There are no more lounges, restaurants, or artworks interspersed here — social areas and areas of rest are separated completely. Rooms line long, almost absurdly wide hallways that project the aura of Legorreta’s beloved haciendas and monasteries. Dim at both night and day, the corridors occasionally reveal glimpses of the courtyards and gardens nested within the compound. These outdoor spaces, populated by trees taller than the hotel itself, feel as though they contain Camino Real’s center of gravity. With their unexpected seclusion, the gardens ask to be peered into, imagined as the backdrop of a certain genre of hotel noir featuring lone travelers, missed connections, reunions, and ruptures. At night, leaves and branches filter light from across the way, revealing a soft glow behind curtains or direct views into rooms opposite your own.

Though no drawings or correspondence speak to the creative development of the gardens, Legorreta is said to have consulted Barragán on the hotel’s grounds. Fascinated with gardens throughout his life, Barragán treated them as cloistered refuges from modern life: “I have wanted to create spaces of passion [...] All of my madness, that I wouldn’t dare to do while awake, I do in my gardens.” Whether through direct input or his general influence, Barragán is present at Camino Real through its gardens and the inward focus they bring: sitting in a central courtyard in front of the swimming pool, the sights and sounds of the world beyond are so insulated that it is easy to forget your position at the heart of North America’s largest city.

The other side to this introversion, the face the hotel presents to the city, is a perimeter of mostly blank walls. Of 12 blocks of rooms, only one looks directly onto a city street. Camino Real is an enclave, one of many Olympic-era projects designed, in Luis M. Castañeda’s analysis, to direct the tourist gaze to a modern, cosmopolitan vision of Mexico and distract from all else. Compare this to the products of Mexico City’s latest wave of tourism — spaces that do not retreat from the city but rather vie for the best way to consume it. In Camino Real’s vicinity, the glass-clad high rises of the St. Regis, Sofitel, and Ritz Carlton offer panoramic views of Mexico City from rooms and rooftop bars that could as easily be found in Miami or Mumbai. Closer to the ground, the boutique hotels and vacation rentals embedded in Roma or Condesa traffic in a perceived authenticity drawn from the scenery of their historic neighborhoods. Camino Real falls short of the visual spectacle offered by these newer developments — less viable as an image destined for social media than sidewalk cafés under blooming jacarandas or the blaze of the sun setting behind an infinity pool on the 39th floor.

Is there something meaningful, a critical position to be found in writing about a hotel? Hotels seem to hold an uneasy position in architecture — scarce in architectural history, theory, and its canons. I struggle to call to mind a list of hotels known for the architects who designed them — Frank Lloyd Wright’s demolished Imperial Hotel, the work of John Portman and his Bonaventure — before resorting to hotels immortalized by writers — Joan Didion at the Royal Hawaiian — iconic movie hotels, and so on. Are hotels compromised as commissions, mostly unremarkable? Are they too commercial or capricious, somehow unlike the accepted testing ground of the architect-commissioned home?

And yet, departing from the generic conventions of tourist infrastructure and the reign of the international style in Mexico, the architecture of Camino Real feels subtly radical, instructive even 60 years after its inception. Embracing simple materials and using the money saved on scale and complexity, Legorreta created a quality of space that persists even with mediocre infill renovations and generic furniture replacing Knoll classics. Traversing this vast, labyrinthine place, with its nine-foot-wide hallways, monumental artworks, and elaborate sequence of vestibules feels like a relief from design driven by optimization and efficiency: “buildings are cold, lifeless, and too predictable,” Legorreta reflected in the same 1990 monograph. “We think that upon entering a place one must know exactly where to go, where the elevators are located, and so on. Yet think of the pleasure people get from seeking.”

The impulse to write about Camino Real is the continuation of this seeking — a way to prolong my wandering and the pleasant state of disorientation that its architecture brings. Writing is a wish that the hotel, currently unprotected by preservation statutes, survives, and that its remaining original artworks stay in place. It is a giving in to the hotel’s mystery and an attempt to pull others into its thrall, so that there may be someone else to cross paths with in the hotel’s corridors, and, after enough cues and an open seat in a lounge or garden, a conversation to be had.