Chapel in Santa Maria del Pilar School

The classical ambition that had made Luis Moya a marginalised and solitary intellectual had disappeared because it was impossible, and the Chapel for the Colegio de El Pilar represents the belated search for modernity. The references, now distanced from tradition and antiquity, became different: it seems that Luis Moya turned his interest towards the organicism of Wrightianism, a modern version more to his liking both for the distance it established from the International style and for its link to the expression of the materials and the identity between form and construction. This probable affiliation, half formal and half conceptual, was completed by a kind of competition: to build in brick, in vaults, the forms in reinforced concrete slabs that had begun to be popularised by the Spanish architect Félix Candela, who had settled in Mexico. Modernity of form and traditionalism of content, even of the material itself. The taste for the expression of materials and for constructively and compositionally articulated surfaces, enhanced by textures, remained in this interpretation as in almost all his works, for this was a habit – in fact, an anti-classical one – of almost his entire career. Desaparecida por imposible una empeñada ambición clásica que había hecho de Luis Moya un intelectual marginado y solitario, la Capilla para el Colegio de El Pilar representa la búsqueda tardía de la modernidad. Las referencias, alejadas ahora de la tradición y de la antigüedad, pasan a ser otras.Tal parece que Luis Moya volviera su interés hacia el organicismo wrightiano, versión moderna más de su agrado tanto por la lejanía que ésta establecía frente al estilo Internacional como por su ligadura a la expresión de los materiales y a la identidad entre forma y construcción.