Casa Cueva, the mid-century home architect Juan O’Gorman built in Mexico City’s Pedregal de San Ángel, is usually told as his story — architecture fused tightly with the volcanic terrain around it. Álvaro Urbano’s new exhibition “Helen” at Museo Jumex tells it through someone else: Helen Fowler O’Gorman, the artist who shared the house and spent fifteen years working on what became her 1961 book on Mexican flowering trees and plants, cultivating the garden that gave the house its character.
“In spaces built by their own inhabitants, architectural decisions are closely tied to a way of living,” Urbano told Designboom in an exclusive interview. “The house opened onto the landscape, or rather surrendered itself to it, incorporating the conditions of the terrain and the presence of plants.” His introduction to Fowler O’Gorman came secondhand — conversations with Mexican friends about Casa Cueva sent him investigating her overlooked practice, which the exhibition now foregrounds through sculpted plants, geological references and architectural fragments occupying the same uncertain present-tense space.
Helen opened 16 October 2026 and runs through 7 February 2027, curated by Rosela del Bosque and Carolina Estrada García. Coverage from Colossal independently corroborates the show’s premise and materials, placing it as part of a broader institutional push to recover women’s overlooked contributions to Mexican modernist architecture and landscape design.