The house of Salomé McAllen and William Scanlan in Brownsville of 1940 was designed by Frank E. Torres, an architect born in Matamoros and trained at the University of Texas, who had worked in Mexico City from 1933 to 1938. The Scanlan House registers Torres’s awareness of the 19th-century Border Brick style. It marks the first Regionalist evocation of the 19th-century vernacular architecture of the Tamaulipas-Texas border region.

An alternative to the Regionalist effort to rationalize the use of historical models, involved the rejection of all historical models in favor of an architecture shaped by the processes of modernization. Function, the materials and techniques of construction, and response to site conditions and climatic contingencies were the constituents of this alternative—modern architecture…