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PIN–UP | INTERVIEW: Agustín Hernández’s Futuristic Monoliths Inspired By Mesoamerican Architecture

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Agustín Hernández is one of the last living masters of 20th-century Modernism — although his is a Modernism with a gloriously idiosyncratic twist. The Mexican architect, born in 1924, boasts an impressive built oeuvre that serves as a link between grand mid-century urban-planning visions and the formally adventurous high-tech fantasies rising in cities around the globe today. His Heroico Colegio Militar (military academy), completed in 1976 in Mexico City (with Manuel González Rul), is perhaps his most important built project, melding indigenous Mexican tectonics and Modernist rationalism to stunning effect. Its rigor and expressive force is said to have inspired Ridley Scott for Blade Runner, and Paul Verhoeven filmed parts of Total Recall there. But while some of his buildings seem lifted straight from science fiction, Hernández’s greater body of work is defined by its diversity and contradictions. There’s a lightness to his architecture, with volumes that appear to soar or float, bu

INTERVIEW: Agustín Hernández’s Futuristic Monoliths Inspired By Mesoamerican Architecture By Suleman Anaya Agustín Hernández photographed by Dorian Ulises López Macías for PIN–UP. Agustín Hernández is one of the last living masters of 20th-century Modernism — although his is a Modernism with a gloriously idiosyncratic twist. The Mexican architect, born in 1924, boasts an impressive built oeuvre that serves as a link between grand mid-century urban-planning visions and the formally adventurous high-tech fantasies rising in cities around the globe today. His Heroico Colegio Militar (military aca

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