Torres de Satélite
Torres de Satélite are five hollow concrete towers by Luis Barragán and Mathias Goeritz, built as the marker at the motorway entrance to Ciudad Satélite.
Facts
Torres de Satélite are five hollow concrete prisms with no rooms inside, placed where the motorway enters Ciudad Satélite.
Luis Barragán and Mathias Goeritz designed them between 1957 and 1958 as the image of Mario Pani's new satellite city for people arriving by car.
Torres de Satélite have no single front view.
As a car passes, their broad planes narrow into thin vertical lines and then open back into walls.
The tallest of the five Torres de Satélite reaches 52 metres.
Horizontal construction joints, made with a technique used for industrial chimneys, strengthen the sense of height.
Jesús Reyes Ferreira advised on the original colours of Torres de Satélite, and they have changed with repaintings since.
A restoration in 2008 removed earlier layers of paint, renewed the colour and added lighting.
The medieval towers of San Gimignano helped Barragán and Goeritz imagine Torres de Satélite: a civic marker made of abstract vertical forms, at the scale of a motorway.
Color System
Limewash White
White is one of the monument's recurring historical paint colors, making the concrete prisms read as large fields of light
Reyes Yellow
Yellow turns one prism into a changing focal point within the moving composition
Bebedero Blue
Blue sets a cool plane against the sky and the warmer neighboring towers
Bougainvillea Red
Red gives the ensemble a saturated vertical counterweight at motorway scale