El arquitecto Lorenzo de la Hidalga

Abstract

Lorenzo de la Hidalga was born in Álava, in the Basque region of Spain, and after qualifying in architecture at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in Madrid, continued his studies in Paris, in the atelier of Henri Labrouste, the architect responsible for the paradigmatic library of St. Geneviève. He made acquaintance with other architects such as Eugène Viollet Le Duc; Edmond Blanc, and with the theories of Louis Durand and Claude Nicolas Ledoux, during what was a brief stay in the French capital but one which deeply marked his development in the profession. In 1838 he moved to Mexico, setting to work rapidly on his first buildings in Mexico City: the market of the Plaza del Volador, the Gran Teatro Santa Anna, (both now disappeared), the project for the monument to Independence for the Plaza Mayor, the dome of Santa Teresa la Antigua, the project for a panoptic prison, for which he carried out a painstaking program entitled “Parallel of Penitentiaries”. The talent of Lorenzo de la Hidalga won him several nominations and honors, including that of Fellow of Merit of the Academia de San Carlos; the Emperor Maximilian awarded him the title “Architect of the Palace and the Cathedral Church”. Mexican architecture owes many of the innovations introduced at that time to De la Hidalga: for example, the concern to make buildings appropriate to the purpose they were to fulfill, and respect for genres. He also had the talent and the vision to make the ancient classical forms more functional, thus adapting them to the demands of the society of his period.