The Fernandez House in Tampico (1926): “Beauty Will Be Edible, or It Will Not Be at All”

Abstract

The Fernández House, located in Tampico downtown, was designed and built in 1926 by the Tampico engineer Bartolo Rodríguez Saunders, who studied at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and the Catalan architect Aréchiga. The building’s ornamentalist design, resembling the abundant decorations of Catalan modernism, could be derived from this connection to Aréchiga. Its patron and original owner was Luciano Fernández Gómez. The local historian Carlos González Salas has said that the Fernández House has long been known in Tampico as the “cake house,” a name that reveals the irony of the building’s ostentation, a symptom of the rising prosperity of its owners at a time that the nationalist cultural project – which aimed for hegemony – had not managed to permeate all sectors of Mexican society.