Luis Barragán: Celebrating Hispanic Architecture
Casa Gilardi Pool, Mexico City. Photographer: Angie McMonigal
Celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month, we look to our neighbor Mexico and recognize the architect and landscape architect Luis Barragán (1902-1988). Barragán's color-saturated geometric buildings etch the contemporary architectural consciousness. Born into a wealthy Catholic family, he grew up on a ranch near Guadalajara and attended the Escuela Libre de Ingenieros, earning a degree in civil engineering. After graduation, Barragán traveled extensively in Europe to expand his architectural education, where he learned about the work of landscape designer, artist, and writer Ferdinand Bac through the books Les Colombières and Jardins Enchantés.
Luis Barragán
Returning to Guadalajara, Barragán began his architectural practice, eventually melding Modernist principles with Mexican vernacular. Further travels to Europe and New York introduced him to Mexican mural painter José Clemente Orozco, architectural theoretician Frederick John Kieslerm, Architectural Record's editor A. Lawrence Kocher, and renowned architect and city planner Le Corbusier. Barragán visited Ferdinand Bac's Mediterranean gardens, Les Colombières, and met the landscape designer who inspired his future work. In 1935, with this cosmopolitan background, he left provincial Guadalajara to live and work in burgeoning Mexico City.
Eduardo Prieto Lopez House, Mexico City
Barragán was a modernist but not a functionalist. Unlike Le Corbusier, he did not believe "a house is a machine for living." Instead, he espoused emotional architecture. He used light, color, shadow, and water to create serenity, meditation, and reflection, integrating the built world with the natural environment. The architect's minimalist structures reference regional traditions, incorporating volcanic tile pavers, wooden beamed ceilings, and stucco walls into baroque landscapes. Architectural scholars make reverential pilgrimages to Mexico, visiting his work. In 1980, Barragán won the Pritzker Architecture Prize; he quoted Ferdinand Bac, "The soul of gardens shelters the greatest sum of serenity at man's disposal."