C
1968
Camino Real, Ciudad de México

In February 1967, Mexican architects Luis Barragán and Ricardo ­Legorreta, then planning the interiors for the new Camino Real hotel in Mexico City, visited Anni and Josef Albers at their home studios in New Haven. They commissioned Anni Albers to create a ­monumental work for the hotel’s lobby bar. The scale and public location called for a robust creative statement. Albers designed a composition of triangles in various tones of red, from crimson to hot pink, appliquéd against a red background. It was fabricated by Abacrome, a specialty firm known for its large, colourful, artist-designed banners and flags that hung outside art galleries in New York City. Albers’s composition revealed complex geometries that evoked pyramidal structures, an abstraction reminiscent of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic architecture that enchanted her.