Torres de Satélite

Torres de Satélite is an urban monument rather than a conventional building: five hollow reinforced-concrete prisms placed at the motorway entrance to Ciudad Satélite in Naucalpan de Juárez, State of Mexico. Designed in 1957–58 by Luis Barragán and Mathias Goeritz, with color advice from Jesús “Chucho” Reyes Ferreira, it turned the approach to Mario Pani’s new satellite city into an architectural image for drivers.

The triangular towers range in height and reach 52 metres at their tallest. They have no inhabitable interior and no single frontal view: when a car passes, their broad planes can compress into narrow vertical lines, then open back into walls. Regular horizontal construction joints, made with a technique associated with industrial chimneys, intensify the sense of vertical ascent; the slightly inclined concrete platform does the same.

Barragán and Goeritz treated the ensemble as inseparable architecture and sculpture at the scale of the highway landscape. The precedent of San Gimignano’s medieval towers helped them imagine a civic marker made from abstract vertical forms, while successive repaintings made color part of its public life. The original scheme and later campaigns have differed; a major restoration in 2008 removed earlier paint layers, renewed the color treatment and added architectural lighting.