Biography | Frida Kahlo — The Blue Cube Juan O'Gorman Bridged to Rivera's Red One

People treat Casa Azul as the only house the marriage occupied. The workrooms of the 1930s sat here. In 1931 Diego Rivera asked Juan O'Gorman to design two separate studios on this San Ángel Inn lot, at Diego Rivera 2 on the corner of Avenida Altavista. O'Gorman finished the pair in 1932. Two concrete cubes, one red for Rivera and one blue for Kahlo, linked only by a narrow roof bridge. Organ-pipe cactus still fences the lot. They moved in during 1934, after three years in the United States. Kahlo used the smaller cube until 1941, when her father died and she went back to Coyoacán. What the Water Gave Me is tied to the bathtub that remains in her bathroom here. Rivera kept the red house until his death in 1957 and made most of his later easel work in it. The federal government assigned the buildings to INBA in 1981. The museum opened on 16 December 1986 and took its present name in 1997. Walk the bridge. The architecture is the argument: two lives, two studios, one lot. Photo: site as standing museum, San Ángel Inn.