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The Geologic Search. Through the years, O'Gorman puzzled over a way to make outdoor murals, finally hit upon the idea of using naturally colored stones. He became an amateur geologist, traveled hundreds of miles—sometimes on donkey-back—searching for stones that would keep their hues through decades of punishing sun and rain. After several years, he had collected 160 samples of volcanic and sedimentary rock, and from these he chose 15 for their color and availability. When Architect Carlos Lazo lured O'Gorman back into architecture to help design a library for the University of Mexico (TIME, Feb. 23, 1953), O'Gorman seized the chance to try his scheme for murals by facing the walls of the library tower with his first big stone mosaic. As a result, he was commissioned by Lazo (now the Communications Minister) to do murals for the Communications building.
Since it was obviously impractical to put up his huge mosaics stone by stone, O'Gorman devised his own method. First, he sketches out his designs in a workshop, then colors sections of the design and pastes them on small building models to see how they will look. Then he draws sections of his mural in actual scale on brown paper, designating color by letter symbol, and finally divides the sheets into one-meter squares.
The Last Plaque. In another workroom, girls spread the sheets on tables, each square in its own wooden frame, then lay out the variously colored stones in the designated spaces. Masons cover the stones with cement. Some 6,000 such squares, each weighing 170 lbs., were constructed, numbered, raised to the building walls to complete the Communications building design. For O'Gorman, it was a tough morning-to-night grind; in addition to the drawing and painting, he supervised the stone-laying and cementing, climbed about the building to see that the plaques were correctly placed. "I invented this technique," O'Gorman explains. "I had to, because I didn't know any other way to do it." Last week O'Gorman supervised the placement of the final plaque and officially turned his mural over to the government.
How long would it stand against the weather? A geologist friend warned that some of the specimen rocks were too soft —they might not last more than 500 years. "Fine," replied Juan O'Gorman. "That's long enough for me."