Guerrero y Torres, Francisco Antonio (1727–1792)

Francisco Antonio Guerrero y Torres (b. February 1727; d. 20 December 1792), Mexican architect. Guerrero y Torres, born in Guadalupe, is the most famous of the last architects of New Spain to achieve maturity and success before the establishment of the Academia de San Carlos and the subsequent adoption of academic neoclassicism. After he passed the examination for master architect in 1767, he designed buildings in a neoclassical style proper to New Spain (generally called neostilo), retaining the materials, taste for color, and many of the motifs of estípite baroque (or Churrigueresque). Favored by wealthy criollos of Mexico City, he designed and built palaces, notably those of Iturbide and of the counts of Santiago de Calimaya. Criticized by the Academia toward the end of his life, Guerrero y Torres nevertheless built, at his own expense and in his characteristic manner, the Chapel of the Pocito near the Basilica of Guadalupe, between 1777 and 1791. It is generally considered his masterpiece.

See alsoArchitecture: Architecture to 1900 .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Heinrich Berlin, "Three Master Architects in New Spain," in Hispanic American Historical Review 27 (1947): 375-383. Ignacio F. González-polo, El palacio de los condes de Santiago de Calimaya (1983).

Additional Bibliography

Fuentes Rojas, Elizabeth, Norma Vázquez García, Laura A. Corona Cabrera, and Bertha Alicia Arizpe Pita. La Academia de San Carlos y los constructores del Neoclásico: Primer catálogo de dibujo arquitectónico, 1779–1843. México, D.F.: Universidad nacional Autónoma de México, Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 2002.

                                      Clara Bargellini