Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capitol offers a new interpretation of the development of modern architecture in the Mexican capital in the first half of the twentieth century by showing the close links between design, evolving understandings of national architectural history, folk art, and social reform. Through analysis of houses, schools, a government ministry, and a workers' park, it repositions the work of famous architects, including Luis Barragán and Juan O'Gorman, in relation to buildings by lesser-known architects and to debates about the uses of history and architecture's relationship to the other arts. By examining major historical and theoretical texts written by architects, together with their buildings, the book demonstrates why creating a distinctively Mexican architecture preoccupied architects whose work was otherwise quite unalike and how and why that concern became central to the profession.

Kathryn E. O'Rourke is an architectural historian and assistant professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, where she teaches art history and urban studies. She received her PhD in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA in architecture from Wellesley College. She has published articles on Mexican architectural rationalism, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's work for the Bacardí Corporation, and Diego Rivera's murals at the Mexican Ministry of Health and the Detroit Institute of Arts; other research interests include the work of Texas architect O'Neil Ford and landscape architecture. In 2013, O'Rourke received the Founders' Prize from the Society of Architectural Historians for the best article in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians by an emerging scholar. Her scholarship has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Society of Architectural Historians.