Luis Barragán (1902-1988) was a unique Mexican: he was almost two meters tall and had clear eyes. He was a serene, deeply religious man who stayed outside of ideological sides and whose refuge was light, silence and gardens. , and in 1980 he was the first architect in his country to receive the Pritzker Prize.
Aware that his architecture could not make sense in another climate, he only built in his country, and thus gave identity to 20th century Mexico. Theirs was a modern architecture, full of Mexican echoes, of the childhood of the family ranch, of the charm of nostalgia.
He was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and drank from its traditions and its colors. He studied engineering, but always with the passion for architecture behind his ear. In 1924 he made a trip to Europe in which, above all, two things inspired him: the illustrations of the German-French cartoonist and writer of the belle époque Ferdinand Bac for his legendary book Les jardins enchantés (drawings from which he would take architectural elements such as gates, lattices and fountains to incorporate them into his later works, and from which he learned the integration of the landscape in the architecture and the architecture of the garden) and the most important: the Alhambra of Granada, because Barragán was captivated by the patios, the elements of water, the idea of ??compressing and decompressing space, the fact of walking through a dark hallway so that suddenly everything opens to light.
Casa Jardín Ortega is the first house designed and built by Luis Barragán to live in, which he did for five years, between 1942 and 1947. He experimented with color, light and shadow to inaugurate his period of emotional architecture, or, at least, the moment foundational in that it begins to overcome the previous architecture most indebted to regionalism first (with its Guadalajara period) and functionalism (the influence of Le Corbusier) later; hence it is considered the transitional house, the beginning of its mature style.
According to critic William Curtis: “Barragán looked beyond the machinist imagery of the International Style, seeking something deeper…in his hands the spatial patterns inherited from modern architecture were used to serve a kind of mystical conservatism.”
The best way to visit this house is with the guides of The Traveling Beetle, a pioneering agency dedicated to architecture and urban planning in CDMX. It borders with his famous Casa Estudio, since he bought the land in 1940 that he would later sell in 1947. Several master lines are concentrated in Casa Ortega that will later characterize his later work that will extend to Casa Gilardi.
To walk through it is to interpret a language of textured walls of uniform colors, ambiguous planes, patio, terrace, secret garden, transition spaces and decoration of the Mexican imagination. Here is the contrast of blue and green, which in Barragán are design elements, colors that he never uses because he already has them, he leaves that task to nature: the blue is given by the sky, the green by the vegetation (only in the Casa Gilardi will use blue in the indoor pool).
His intense passion for horse riding explains another of his great works: the San Cristóbal stables (stables, main photo) and the Egerstrom House, (in addition to the neighboring Fountain of the Lovers), a project designed for a community of equestrians in which he raised his love for horses on a spiritual level. Completed in 1969, today it is considered an icon of contemporary architecture due to the immaculate use of water, color and the geometric abstraction of the planes. “My work is autobiographical,” he said, “it is the memory of my father’s ranch from my childhood and adolescence. In it I have tried to adapt the needs of modern life to the magic and melancholy for old times.”
After receiving the Pritzker Prize in 1980, Barragán explained: “architecture is art when, consciously or unconsciously, an atmosphere of aesthetic emotion is created and when the environment arouses a feeling of well-being.” That is exactly what we find in his works, in addition to the pink, always present.
Barragán’s pink comes from the chromatic richness of the Mexican popular art with which he grew up, from the crafts, textiles, and work with clay integrated into popular culture and from the teachings given to him by his painter friend Chucho Reyes, who taught him to use color. There is pink integrating an aesthetic and an emotion. Light and color as elements in the creation of an architectural space. Low shapes, right angles, spaces that spread serenity, enchantment, mystery, the adoption of sobriety to seclude oneself from the world and feel safe.
