Margaret Hooks

The House That Sings
A Song to Surrealism in the Mexican Jungle

Las Pozas (the pools), was once home to the eccentric, English aristocrat, Edward James, poet, patron, collector, and architect of this spectacular mountainside monument to surrealist art. A veritable enchanted garden, where some thirty-six enormous, brightly colored concrete structures vie for space with the lush jungle vegetation that surrounds and threatens to absorb them, located on the outskirts of the town of Xilitla, in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi.

James, who was rumored to be the bastard son of Edward VII, inherited a large chunk of the Phelps-Dodge family fortune at an early age and proceeded to lavish it on artistic projects. He financed a ballet season for George Balanchine, published John Betjeman's first book of poetry and became the leading patron of artists, such as Salvador Dali, Leonora Carrington and Rene Magritte, whose "La Reproduction Interdite" is an intriguing portrait of him.

A frustrated artist and poet, although he did publish some very passable verse and a bizarre novel, Edward James was finally able to realize his artistic desires by creating Las Pozas -- a work twenty years in the making and still unfinished. In 1945, he and his handsome Yaqui-indian companion, Plutarco Gastelum, arrived in this part of Mexico, abounding in waterfalls, parrots and butterflies, in pursuit of wild orchids, one of James' many passions.

Together they bought a swathe of jungle hillside so that James could cultivate his beloved orchids. But in 1962, there was a freak snowstorm in Xilitla and it killed off the orchids. (Apparently, the local people had never seen snow and thought it was white volcanic ash!) A disillusioned James decided to abandon orchid cultivation and create a surrealistic garden of Eden for himself and the exotic animals he adored. He described it as a sanctuary created for his "ideas and illusions."

Las Pozas, named after the nine pools formed by the jungle river and its enormous waterfall, is a frenzied fantasy in concrete. Much magic is wrought in this partnership of the improbable: the most urban of substances, concrete, with nature's most exuberant, the jungle. Water dripping from enormous green leaves forms pools on their concrete counterparts and ponderous, exotic flowers are wrought in a colored cement at times so vibrant we can almost smell their heavy scent. Slender, swaying concrete poles of bamboo mirror fifty-foot stalks a few feet away, the first being the Bamboo Palace; it was going to be Edward's house.

Most of the fantastic edifices scattered throughout the hillside have very bizarre names, some of which indicate their eventual purpose, although it is unlikely that James really believed in anything so prosaic as a "purpose." There is the "House with three stories that might be five", of course it isn't; The Temple of the Ducks, no ducks; and The Archway of the Bats, which there probably are.

This "other" world is approached through an elliptical dark red door which opens onto a winding path lined with ten foot concrete snakes poised for strike: serpents in this garden of eden, or its guardians? Once inside, we are immediately enveloped in a lush greenness, surrounded by enormous tropical plants and flowers, the air thick with the cries of exotic birds and insects and the sounds of running water.

Then, among the foliage another universe comes into view. An architect's delirium of corinthian columns, elegant archways, gothic windows, oriental pagodas, dangling stairways, impossibly delicate platforms and bridges, an exquisite fleur de lis parapet. The slender structures appear to float and soar, their unfinished state allowing our imagination to do likewise as we struggle to grasp their conception.

James spared no expense on his creation, even having electricity, cables, posts and all, brought from Xilitla and the structures wired so that he could illuminate them. Locals still talk of the magical spectacle as the mountainside glowed with light. It is hard to estimate the total cost of Las Pozas; James claimed to have spent millions of dollars on it.

Tales of James' eccentricities abound: he loved exotic animals, traveling frequently with his pet boa constrictors and sharing his bed with two salamanders. Often he would go to Las Pozas at night where he would lie naked on a slab built to accommodate his body with a lit candle at each of the four corners. He was obsessive about contamination and would boil used paper clips in eau de cologne before he would re-use them.

For many, his work-in-progress meant hard work and frustration as, over the years, some 150 local artisan builders struggled to realize his dreams in concrete. It was much trial and error; tasks were frequently repeated to ensure the correct reinforcement for the structures and reproduce the exact colors James envisioned. He was traveling a lot of the time and most of the practical tasks were left to Plutarco, who acted as the overseer of the project. The work of a local carpenter, Jose Aguilar, who made the huge wooden molds based on James' designs is particularly striking. Today these works of art in-their-own-right can be seen piled in huge mounds on the grounds of Las Pozas.

In the late-1970s, Plutarco became chronically ill and in 1984 Edward died. Las Pozas began to deteriorate as Plutarco's family, particularly his son, Kako, struggled to protect it from the jungle climate which threatened to destroy it. All money for the project had dried up at James' death. While some of the deterioration is now being held at bay, the project is in need of restoration. In the 1960s, Edward James was one of the main forces behind the preservation of the Watts Towers. Hopefully Las Pozas will be sufficiently appreciated for the artistic monument it is and conserved accordingly.

- By Margaret Hooks (ARTNews, March 1998) Copyright Margaret Hooks 1998