Guadalajara is often seen as a place of tequila and mariachi music. Can Alejandro Zohn, whose buildings include a market roofed by giant shells, make it famous for architecture?

A miniature billboard pokes up above the neatly trimmed hedge in the garden of the Schindler House in Los Angeles, as if a roadside ad had blown in from nearby Sunset Strip. Cantilevered from a chunky steel column, strapped to a base of pink concrete blocks, it is a startling arrival on the grounds of this hallowed modernist sanctuary. It’s particularly strange as the hoarding in question is not advertising injury law or a Hollywood movie about a coked-up bear, but a 1970s public housing project in the Mexican city of Guadalajara.

“The billboards are trying to make trouble,” says Mimi Zeiger, co-curator of an exhibition here about the work of Mexican-Austrian architect Alejandro Zohn. She gestures to a range of hoarding structures scattered around the garden of the famous house, like fragments of a more brash urban realm impinging on the quiet oasis, each displaying an image of Zohn’s work. “It’s a way to bring the scale of the city into the more secluded, domestic space, creating a bridge between Guadalajara and LA.”

The bold signs are a provocative addition to the West Hollywood sanctum built by Austrian émigré architect Rudolph Schindler in 1922 and often regarded as the Ur-monument of southern California modernism. The house was designed after Schindler and his wife spent the summer in a cabin in Yosemite national park, and it embodies his desire to channel the sense of camping out in nature in the form of a bohemian shack.

For all the sanctity heaped on it since, the house is a refreshingly rough and ready thing, built on a shoestring. A poured concrete slab serves as both the foundation and finished floor surface, on which the walls were cast flat then hauled up into place, topped with a simple redwood roof, with big canvas panels that slide open to the garden. It is a poetically primitive place, exuding the excitement of outdoor living from someone freshly arrived from colder climes – complete with “sleeping baskets” on the roof (on the assumption that LA was warm enough to spend nights outside. They soon found it wasn’t.)

Since the 1990s, the house has been home to the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, an outpost of the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, hosting a programme that explores the intersection of the two disciplines, while always being careful not to screw anything into the precious walls (the property is owned and maintained by local non-profit, Friends of the Schindler House). It is a fine balancing act of keeping the house sparse enough for the pilgrims who come to worship the purity of the architecture, while injecting enough variety to keep local audiences coming back.

The choice of Zohn is an inspired one. Like Schindler, he was a Jewish émigré to the Americas – his parents fled Vienna in 1939 when he was eight – and a prolific architect, with around 500 projects to his name, yet he remains virtually unknown outside Mexico. Unlike Luis Barragán or Félix Candela, icons of mid-century modernism whose photogenic work travelled widely, Zohn was a generation later (he died in 2000), and was based in the western city of Guadalajara – often regarded by Mexico City’s taste-making elite as a provincial place of tequila and mariachi music.