Luis Jose Antonio Miró Quesada Garland (1914-1994) was a Peruvian architect, professor, essay writer, art critic and a promoter of modern architecture in Peru.
[1] He played an important part in the process of change in Lima, from a society rooted in tradition and academic canon into a modern one.
As soon as he graduated from UNI (Spanish acronym for National University of Engineering), he designed the building for the city council of Miraflores, one of the most traditional districts in Lima.
Based on the Vitruvian triad as classic goals of architecture, he states that these need to be rethought in consideration to the cultural, social and technological changes of the 19th century.
Later, all these new courses were rearranged into a more coherent curricular plan by the board and student representatives, thus beginning the teaching of Modern architecture in Peru.
[6] They expressed their frustration for the lack of a “modern” view of the architecture, art, culture and society in Peru, and claimed to fix such situation.
As a general concept, the house is planned as an introverted architecture inside a single volume of broad and fluid spaces, defined by the furniture and their use and not by their physical limits.
In addition, it can be seen the influence of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye because of the long horizontal window on the second story, framed by a continuous balcony, and the curved walls on the roof.
Miro Quesada employed a cylindrical volume to connect every floor with a spiral staircase as a reference to Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House (1930) in order to have an important vertical reinforcement.
Miro Quesada also looked for the integration of art and architecture in his work, idea popularized as Gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner, 1849) by the Bauhaus school, established in 1991 by Walter Gropius.