An architectural history can often begin with the person tending the garden. In Helen, a compelling new exhibition at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Spanish artist Álvaro Urbano approaches the legendary mid-century Casa Cueva through the botanical imagination of Helen Fowler O’Gorman. Built in the mid-20th century within the rugged, volcanic terrain of Pedregal de San Ángel, the iconic residence brought modern architecture into an intimate, daring dialogue with the surrounding topography and native vegetation. Urbano draws these intertwined histories into a unified, immersive installation where sculpted plants, geological references, and fragile architectural memories occupy the same uncertain, poetic present. Curated by Rosela del Bosque and Carolina Estrada García, the exhibition runs from October 16, 2026, to February 7, 2027, placing Helen’s artistic contributions and her deep relationship with Mexico’s rich flora firmly at the center of the historical narrative.
Urbano’s initial introduction to Helen came organically through conversations with Mexican friends, whose vivid stories about Casa Cueva prompted him to deeply investigate her creative practice. Reflecting on the project in an exclusive interview, the artist notes that the way spaces are inhabited fundamentally shapes their architectural identity. "In spaces built by their own inhabitants, architectural decisions are closely tied to a way of living," Urbano tells designboom. For the artist, the house itself functioned as an evolving sculpture, where its relationship with the surrounding landscape was entirely inseparable from the daily routines of the people who lived there. "The house opened onto the landscape, or rather surrendered itself to it, incorporating the conditions of the terrain and the presence of plants," he adds. Following Helen through the daily life of the house shifts attention away from monumental structural forms and toward the quiet, repetitive acts of observation, cultivation, and care that gave the architecture its true character.
Helen Fowler O’Gorman’s Botanical World Takes Shape
Inside her studio at Casa Cueva, Helen spent fifteen rigorous years working on a monumental book published in 1961 as Mexican Flowering Trees and Plants. Its scope extended far beyond the boundaries of her personal garden into the broader, diverse Mexican landscape, which she explored extensively alongside her husband, the renowned artist and architect Juan O’Gorman. While Juan scoured the terrain in search of differently colored minerals for his iconic petro-murals, Helen diligently collected, studied, and documented flowers and plants. "There is something beautiful about that shared search for color: he found it in minerals; she found it in flowers and plants," Urbano reflects. This striking parallel provides the exhibition with an intimate and deeply human point of departure: two creative practices observing the exact same terrain, gathering disparate elements from nature, and bringing them back together into a shared domestic world.
Because Helen’s original watercolor paintings were unfortunately lost over time, Urbano turned instead to the book’s printed reproductions, translating their two-dimensional botanical imagery into tangible, three-dimensional forms constructed from metal and paint. "I conceived these sculptures as small monuments to her way of observing Mexico’s flora, to her affections and the attention she devoted to it," he explains. This deliberate passage from watercolor to printed page, and finally to sculpture, makes the physical and temporal distance from the originals an essential part of the work. Helen’s plants enter a completely new material life, carrying subtle traces of her original gaze alongside the artistic decisions of Urbano’s interpretation. Within the installation space, these botanical sculptures coexist harmoniously with references to the unique geological landscape of the Pedregal, Juan’s historic petro-murals, and the later alterations introduced by Mexican artist Helen Escobedo, who subsequently occupied Casa Cueva in later years.
Architectural Fiction Allows Different Times to Coexist
Those successive eras of habitation remain deliberately unresolved within the gallery space. "We do not know whether the petro-murals are being covered or uncovered," Urbano says, describing the layered nature of the installation. "Rather than fixing an original state of the house, I wanted its different times to coexist." Historical testimonies, archival photographs, and material remnants offer visitors a window into Casa Cueva while leaving notable gaps and occasionally contradicting one another. Urbano embraces these historical inconsistencies, giving them ample room within the exhibition layout and allowing the house to emerge organically through the diverse experiences of its various inhabitants. Visitors encounter a physical space whose complex transformations resist a single, definitive account, with Helen’s botanical work providing a vital gateway into memories that traditional architectural histories often leave at the margins.
This sustained interest in unfinished stories and lingering narratives extends across Urbano’s broader artistic practice, which frequently returns to interrupted projects and places where something remains permanently pending. The strategic use of fiction allows him to alter historical coordinates, continuing an abandoned possibility or bringing together moments that never actually coincided in real time. "Architecture thus becomes a character with its own voice, capable of recounting its changes, triumphs, and failures," he explains. By asking the foundational question of "what if?", the artist opens a building up to imaginative possibilities far beyond its documented past. This approach also prompts a much closer look at how historical records are constructed in the first place: examining whose version survives, which experiences quietly disappear, and what might still be communicated through the gaps. In Helen, this structural freedom allows the house’s botanical, geological, and domestic histories to share a single, resonant stage.
Sculpted Plants and the Art of Believable Illusion
The worlds of theater and cinema heavily inform how Urbano constructs these evocative encounters, granting seemingly ordinary objects the subtle ability to suggest events entirely outside the visitor’s direct view. Describing his spatial installations, he points to small details like discarded cigarette butts that imply someone has just occupied a chair, or dry leaves scattered across a floor that suggest a sudden gust of wind has recently crossed a room. "Illusion allows me to show the life of an object," he says. "More than replicating its appearance, I seek to imitate its life and transport it into a setting where it can tell a story." Such meticulous details invite viewers to actively assemble their own mental account of what might have just happened. Urbano connects this psychological process directly to human memory itself, which is inherently fragmentary, blurred, and liable to absorb things that never actually occurred.
This carefully crafted illusion also rewards close, patient inspection by the viewer. Urbano sculpts the botanical works inside his Berlin studio without ever taking molds from original objects, ensuring that every bend, curve, and inclination is a deliberate, hand-formed gesture. "The tilt of a leaf or the orientation of a flower gives them an attitude," he explains. "I am interested in how the object looks at you, what relationship it establishes with you." Approaching the sculptures closely reveals their true underlying materials and the visible traces of their making, adding another layer of encounter to the initial impression experienced from a distance. For Urbano, discovering how a scene has been constructed leaves its core emotional possibilities entirely intact. "As in theater, recognizing the artifice does not prevent us from entering the fiction or establishing an emotional connection with what happens."
