Architecture Before Form

Harvard GSD

Las Pozas in Xilitla, Mexico, is one of the most extraordinary architectural landscapes of the twentieth century — a surrealist garden interlaced within the Sierra Huasteca jungle, imagined and built by the English eccentric Edward James beginning in 1962, after a frost killed the thousands of orchids he had spent years collecting. What replaced them was stranger and more durable: a proliferation of concrete follies, stairways to nowhere, columns without ceilings, arches framing only sky, and…