Luis Barragán

Architect, Mexico
Luis Barragán was at the forefront of a generation of Mexican architects who followed
a fascination with European functionalist design; they endeavored to reconcile
modernism with the indigenous architecture of Mexico, in order to express a distinct
sense of place.
Barragán is best known for a small body of post-World War II buildings and
landscapes that merge modern materials and minimalist cubic form, with discreet
references to local culture, personal memory, figurative surrealist painting, and Mexican
and Mediterranean vernacular forms. These works are marked by frequent use of brilliant
saturated colors (pinks, blues, yellows, and reds are prevalent) and by a sophisticated
handling of space, texture, siting, and natural light. His most significant projects involved
speculative designs for residential subdivisions, and private houses for wealthy clients.
Among the former are the seminal Jardines del Pedregal (1945–50), which he called his
most important work; Las Arboledas (1958–59); and Los Clubes (1963–64), all in
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Mexico City. Among his private houses, key examples include the González Luna and
Cristo houses (1928 and 1929) in Guadalajara, his private residence in Mexico City’s
Tacubaya district (1947), and houses for Eduardo Prieto López (1950), Antonio Galvez
(1959), Folke Egerstrom (1967–68), and Francisco Gilardi (1976), all built in Mexico
City as well. He also built other projects, including small chapels, such as the one for the
Capuchinas Sacramentarias del Purísimo Corazón de Maria (1953–55) again in the
Tacubaya district. There were also multifamily housing units, such as the apartment
house he designed with José Creixell and Max Cetto for Mexico City’s Plaza Melchor
Ocampo (1940); public sculptures, such as the Satellite City Towers (1957), with Mathias
Goeritz, for Mario Pani’s Ciudad Satélite subdivision north of the City; and semi-public
gardens, as those for the Hotel Pierre Marquez (1955) in Acapulco.
Barragán was born in Guadalajara to a large, wealthy, devoutly Roman Catholic
family. Following long stints on his family’s cattle ranch near the Jaliscan village of
Mazamitla, and preparatory school in Guadalajara, he received his civil engineering
degree in 1925 from Guadalajara’s Escuela Libre de Ingenieros. He later completed his
course in architecture there under Agustín Basave, who was a disciple of the French
Beaux-Arts master Hippolyte Taine, but the school closed shortly before his degree was
awarded. This formal study was followed by travel to Europe. In 1924–26, during the
first of two trips, Barragán was especially impressed by visits to the Alhambra, and the
Parisian Exposition des Arts Decoratifs , where he first encountered works by Le Corbusier (whom he met there) and
French author, illustrator, and landscape gardener Ferdinand Bac. In 1930–31, he visited
Bac at his home, Les Colombières, in Menton, on the French Ĉote d’Azur. Bac
encouraged his interest in the poetic use of vernacular architecture and nostalgia. The
visual impressions and contacts he gained on these voyages were to nourish Barragán’s
thought process and practice for many years to come.
Barragán’s career can be divided neatly into three periods. The first lasted from 1927–
36, and included his work in and around Guadalajara. During this time, he completed
work on a city park, Parque de la Revolución (1935), with his brother Juan José, and a
dozen villas and small rental houses. The houses, such as those for Efraín González Luna
and Gustavo Cristo, are thick walled and cubic, with clay tile roofs, deep-set roundarched
voids, and complicated spatial arrangements, and reflect a formal vocabulary
indebted to Moorish and Jaliscan vernacular sources, and to Bac’s illustrated books Les Columbiè res and
Les Jardines Enchantés (both published in 1925).
In 1936 Barragán moved to Mexico City, then booming after the cessation of a long
and devastating civil war. Over the next few years there, he built some 30 small houses
and apartment buildings. Most of these were speculative ventures that he financed
himself, and most were done in collaboration with other architects, such as Creixell and
Cetto. Like much of the architecture then being built in Mexico City, Barragán’s thinwalled,
glass and concrete buildings, with their roof terraces and factory windows,
borrowed heavily from the work of Le Corbusier. Buildings such as these, built by
Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, and others, were seen by many progressive Mexicans as
appropriately quick, cheap, efficient, and modern, and free of the historical and
ideological baggage of earlier revival styles.
During the early 1940s, Barragán slackened his professional pace. He
spent time designing a group of private gardens at his home in Tacubaya,
and on property that he had acquired in the rugged lava fields south of
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Mexico City. This last area, known as El Pedregal, or “the rocky place,”
provided the inspiration and the setting for the 865-acre Jardines del
Pedregal, the first major work of Barragán’s third and final phase. At El
Pedregal, he and his staff worked with or took inspiration from many
others, including Max Cetto, sculptor Mathias Goeritz, painters Diego
Rivera and Dr. Atl, financier José Alberto Bustamante, city planner Carlos
Contreras, and photographer Armando Salas Portugal—and designed
roads and water systems, public plazas and sculpture, demonstration
houses and gardens, and launched an extensive print and broadcast
advertising campaign.

Roads, gardens, and modern, flat-roofed houses—
some bearing subtle, formal similarity to the walled courts and highbeamed
ceilings of Mexican colonial-era convents and haciendas—were
fitted amidst the swirling stone eddies and distinctive native vegetation of the site. Many of
Mexico’s best-known modern architects, including Francisco Artigas, Enrique del Moral,
and Felix Candela, built houses there. Barragán was criticized at times by his Mexican
colleagues for his work’s “scenography” and diversion from functional and politically
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progressive concerns, but during the early 1950s El Pedregal became a substantial
financial and international critical success.
Barragán’s subsequent projects, such as Las Arboledas and the Egerstrom and Gilardi
houses, carry the themes explored in El Pedregal forward. In them, one finds more
evolved versions echoing the play of light, shadow, water, and wall, its dramatic use of
color and varied textures, its startling juxtapositions of the old and the new, the local and
the imported, and the natural and the man-made. These designs capture scenography at its
best, stage sets for unspecified yet solemn rituals, thick with silence, time, and gravitas.
Although much of Barragán’s best work, including the Jardines del Pedregal, has been
insensitively modified or destroyed, his influence continues to be wide ranging. Many
younger Mexican architects, including Ricardo Legorreta, have treated his forms and
signature colors as the basis of a distinctly Mexican modern architecture. Outside
Mexico, designers as diverse as Tadao Ando and Mark Mack have attributed his work as
a source of inspiration.
In 1976 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective exhibition
of his work. This honor came as he was completing his last projects prior to suffering a
long and debilitating illness and brought him renewed attention after two decades of
neglect. Four years later, in 1980, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize.