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Designed in 1931 by the architect and painter Juan O'Gorman, the house-studio that the muralist Diego Rivera and the artist Frida Kahlo occupied in the San Angel district of Mexico City is regarded as one of the first works of functionalist modern architecture in Latin America, and it now operates as a museum dedicated to the couple. O'Gorman, a close friend of Rivera and an admirer of the European modernist Le Corbusier, built not one but two separate houses, a larger one painted red and white for Rivera and a smaller blue one for Kahlo, linked at roof level by a slender bridge, an arrangement that mirrored the couple's famously turbulent relationship in which they lived side by side yet apart. The bold, industrial design, with its exposed concrete, factory-style windows and cactus fence, was startling for its time and reflected the revolutionary spirit of the artists who lived there. Rivera kept his studio in the larger house and worked there for much of his life, and the building today preserves his easels, brushes, tools and personal effects, along with his collection of folk art and the giant papier-mache figures he loved. The pairing of the two contrasting houses, the bold red and white block for Rivera and the smaller blue one for Kahlo, joined only by a narrow rooftop walkway, has come to be read as an architectural portrait of a marriage that was passionate, creative and frequently stormy, the couple choosing to live near one another yet each retaining a separate domain. Juan O'Gorman, who designed the complex while still a young man, was a pioneer of the functionalist movement in Mexico, and these houses, with their raw concrete, industrial windows and exposed services, broke sharply with the ornate styles that had gone before, scandalising some contemporaries while establishing O'Gorman as an important architect in his own right. Rivera worked here through the most productive decades of his career, surrounded by the easels, pigments and tools of his trade, by his cherished collection of Mexican folk art and pre-Hispanic pieces, and by the towering papier-mache Judas figures and skeletons he delighted in. The studio, preserved as he left it, conveys a strong sense of the man at work. Now run as a museum, the complex draws admirers of the two artists and of modern architecture alike, offering insight into the daily life, working methods and tangled relationship of two of the most famous figures in Mexican art.