Margaret Hooks
 Photos of Las Pozas by Margaret Hooks   Spanish edition, 2008 |
Surreal Eden: Edward James & Las PozasLas Pozas (the pools), was once home to the English surrealist, Edward James, poet, patron, and architect of this spectacular mountainside monument to surrealist art where brightly colored concrete structures vie for space with the lush vegetation that surrounds and threatens to absorb it. Located on the outskirts of the town of Xilitla, in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. James, whose father was rumoured to be 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. In 1945,arrived in this part of Mexico, abounding in waterfalls, parrots and butterflies, in pursuit of wild orchids, one of James' many passions. Las Pozas, named after the nine pools formed 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. 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. -- Margaret Hooks Copyright © Margaret Hooks 1998 Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2006, 208pps., w'ill., chron., biblio., index, Hardcover. ISBN:1568986122 Edward James y Las Pozas: Un sueno surrealists en la selva Mexicana. Turner, Mexico City, 2008 w'ill., Hardcover. ISBN: |
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