The editorial categories are research topics that have guided researchers during the recovery phase and continue to be the impetus behind the Documents Project’s digital archive and the Critical Documents book series. Developed by the project’s Editorial Board, each of the teams analyzed this framework and adapted it to their local contexts in developing their research objectives and work plans during the Recovery Phase. Learn more on the Editorial Framework page.
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In this article written for The Architectural Forum, a New York City publication, in January 1934, the muralist Diego Rivera made public his point of view about the necessary link between architecture and painting. The purpose of the link was to achieve a harmonic aesthetic composition between the two disciplines, the same claim made by David Alfaro Siqueiros starting in the 1930s. For his part, Rivera focuses on mural painting, more specifically the fresco, emphasizing that the characteristics of rendering a fresco are compatible with the structure of a building under construction. Rivera makes a strong case to architects, asking them to consider suitable spaces for fresco mural paintings in their architectural designs.
These ideas that Diego Rivera published in this article were the forerunners of the artistic movement that architects and visual artists in the late 1940s and early 1950s called "art integration" because it combined architectural design--interior and/or exterior spaces--with pictorial or sculptural decoration. These ideas can be found in the writings of the mural painters, who carried on an ongoing debate about the social and functional utility of their murals in the sphere of the public buildings they were decorating. Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was one of this group, and among the letters galore he wrote, he addressed the architects of his time. He asked them to consider the artistic utility of their buildings and whether or not they were including spaces suitable for mural paintings in their designs. These proposals materialized in the project known as Proyecto Hospitales [Hospital Construction Project], started in 1944, including a design by the architect Enrique Yáñez (1908-1990) for the Hospital de la Raza in Mexico City that included spaces set aside for murals. Rivera painted one of the spaces, El pueblo en Demanda de Salud [The People's Demand for Better Health], and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974) created the mural Por una seguridad completa y para todos los mexicanos [For an Encompassing Social Security of All Mexicans].