LUIS BARRAGAN HIS HOUSE
I
THE HOUSE OF LUIS BA RR A G AN DEVICE FOR AN EPIPHANY JUAN PALOMAR
It all began with some dogs, so the story goes. One morning, a civil engineer from Guadalajara entered a neighborhood in Tacubaya, in Mexico City, looking for a house where, as he had been told, there were some dogs for sale in which for some reason he was interested. Luis Barragan had moved his residence five years before, in 1935, from Guadalajara to the capital city. He had devoted the first decade of his professional career, which began in 1925, to building a series of houses for wealthy clients in his hometown of Guadalajara. Those houses reveal the well attested influence of Ferdinand Bae and his evocations of the Mediterranean, the recreation of the traditional vernacular architecture of Jalisco, and the early development of themes to which Barragan would return all through his life: light and its DEVICE FOR AN EPIPHANY
transfigurations, the creation of intimacy as the basic core of his aspirations, color as a contained, elementary grammar, the very deliberate succession of open and closed spaces, and the use of the rooftop as a domestic space exposed to the weather. Barragan spent his first years in Mexico City in pursuit of economic stability, lost as a result of the sale of his family’s agricultural interests in Jalisco, which had been centered around the hacienda of Corrales in the Sierra del Tigre, not far from one of his places of reference and predilection: Mazamitla. To this end, Barragan designed a series of buildings for different clients, all marked with the imprint of the architectural trends then in vogue. It is not difficult to detect in his production of those years the influence of a figure whose work wou ld never cease to interest him throughout his career: Le Corbusier. There was a speculative element-in every sense of the word-to these early Mexico City works, and indeed
I Rooftop perspective
“IN THE GARDENS AND HOMES DESIGNED BY ME, I HAVE ALWAYS ENDEAVORED TO ALLOW FOR THE INTERIOR PLACID MURMUR OF SILENCE, AND MY FOUNTAINS, SILENCE SIGNS”. -LB
a highly personal seal that gives them a clear interest to anyone tracing the architect’s development. Nevertheless, they represent no more than a transitional phase in an exploration that would go very much deeper. The transition to the next stage of his career is marked by the acquisition of a lot called El Cabrio, located on the border of an area that would thereafter be a central focus for Barragan: the Pedregal de San Angel. On this piece of land the architect began a formal and detailed exploration of one of his obsessions: the garden. This period marked a rupture in Barragan’s career. Around 1940 he circulated a message amongst his clients and friends, cordially informing them that he was terminating the work he had so far been engaged in Mexico City as an architect and builder, planning in the future to direct his efforts to other tasks. His friends have attested to the fact that, from then on, Barragan concentrated his energies exclusively on those project and commissions
whose characteristics he could freely define and whose scope he could fully control. This transition coincided with Barragan’s search for dogs in the neighborhood of Tacubaya, when he came across a lot delimited by the former Calle de Madereros. There he discovered a considerable extension of land with some magnificent trees which caused him to change the object of his search. He offered to purchase the entire lot from its bewildered residents. In this way he became the owner of several hectares of land that contained a few old constructions and some trees, surrounded by the popular neighborhood in which he would reside for the rest of his life.
MADREDEROS Barragan referred to his first house by the name of the street that wound down from the wooded heights to the west and owed its name to the supplies of timber in the area: Madereros. He constructed this first attempt by reutilizing certain spaces that THE HOUSE OF LUIS BARRAGAN
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he considered usable and completing them with others. This is the construction now known as the ortega house. Articulated around a patio, it opens with greater intensity to the rest of the lot, designed by barragan as an enormous garden. He made use of some former platforms and constructed others himself, planted a large number of trees, designed pools and fountains, and scattered some fragments of copies of classical sculptures. The house is a testimony to the evolution of Barragan’s explorations. Even as it adopts a stripped-down, functional language, it returns to elements present in his first experiments in Guadalajara: the patio and its implications, the transitions carefully arranged between spaces, the modulation of light through grids and openings of varying dimensions, the deliberate changes of level, covered and uncovered terraces, and rooftops as inhabitable areas.
DEVICE FOR AN EPIPHANY
THE DEFINITIVE HOUSE Seven years later, Barragan decided to build a new house for himself. From the garden of the former house he cut off an area of just 900 square meters. The anchor and focus was a pirul (a Peruvian peppertree), still in existence, which overhung part of the lot. It was in response to this tree, to its significance as synthesis and emblem of a reencounter with nature, that the foundational gesture of the house emerged: the enormous window that separates and unites the internal and external areas of the residence. As if the objective of the entire construction were to place itself both in the garden and in front of the garden. Many years later, in a conversation with a visitor who had expressed his astonishment at the power of the space that looked out through that window, Barragan commented laconically: “But it’s nothing more than a troje. ... “ That troje, that copy of the storehouses used in rural constructions to
II View of the stairway leading from the library to the mezzanine level.
“HOW CAN I FORGET JOY? I BELIEVE THAT A WORK OF ART REACHES PERFECTION WHEN IT CONVEYS SILENT, JOY AND SERENITY.� -LB
store grains and other crops, is the key to its fundamental use as the guiding space of the house. A diaphanous and unified space, open in very different ways to the west of the garden and the east of the street, roofed in the traditional manner with pinewood beams supported by rubblework joists. A wooden staircase, built into the wall, leads up to the shadowy mezzanine that mysteriously completes the space. The troje was a multiple space from the very beginning. Living room, library, study, and workplace, or even a place to eat occasionally. It was only some years later that the architect decided to erect a series of thin half-height partitions that sectioned off the space and gave it its present character. In the same way, he replaced the original ironwork grid of the window with the large panes of glass, divided by a cross, which can now be seen. Garden and troje: the essential duality of the house, which nevertheless implies the initial, generating presence of the natural space, of the
open area, since domesticated, which gives sense and reason to the settlement of the landscape. Barragan found a garden in a natural state, which he reshaped and cultivated, loading it with intentions and possibilities; then he sectioned off a part of it, which nevertheless depended for its full functioning on the larger garden that surrounded it. The architect was careful to insist, in the deed drawn up to subdivide the property, on the enjoyment of certain clearings and vistas in the direction of the surrounding lot that would guarantee the integral condition of his own house. In this way, Barragan included and virtually comprehended the original garden that surrounds the new lot, and in this way he prolonged its perspectives and effaced its limits. This placed the house in a context in which permanent contemplation of nature becomes its principal measuring rod. The most significant spaces of the residence address themselves to this vocation: the troje of the living THE HOUSE OF LUIS BARRAGAN
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room/library, the breakfast nook and dining area, the architect’s own room, and the neighboring sleeping area.
JUST ANOTHER NEIGHBOR The facade of the house is simply a prolongation of the street front formed by the older constructions Barragan used for his first house. From this anonymous and utilitarian matrix, closer to vernacular architecture than to any pretentious “signature” building, can be deduced the intention expressed when the house is read from the outside. No one would guess, walking by on the street, that the architecture thus revealing its outer limits could contain such pro bring intensity as is to be found within. A single distinctive note on the facade: the square window with its grid of translucent panes that filters the eastern sunlight into the living room. The natural color of the plaster was the only one permitted by the architect. In this way, with studied naturalness, the house is just another inhabitant DEVICE FOR AN EPIPHANY
of the neighborhood, which it shares in simplicity with apartment houses and workshops, corner grocery stores, tortilla outlets, and a diverse range of other constructions
ARRIVING In centuries-old fashion, the house is entered by way of a transition space, a pause. The vestibule compresses and directs the movement that has brought the visitor to the threshold of the door. The light that reaches the glass panes above the door-way discreetly illuminates a bench that prefigures and heralds an incipient hospitality, slightly lighting up the white of the walls and polishing the wood of the bench with its offer of repose. After a few stone steps and a second door, a larger space meets the gaze with a burst of intense pink and light streaming One of the doors of the vestibule, of the same color as the wall, leads to the kitchen and services. A small transition space leads into the breakfast nook. In fact,
III Entry on Calle de General Francisco Ramirez no. 14.
“ONLY IN INTIMATE COMMUNION WITH SOLITUDE MAY MAN FIND HIMSELF. SOLITUDE IS GOOD COMPANY AND MY ARCHITECTURE IS NOT FOR THOSE WHO FEAR OR SHUN IT.� -LB
it is an alternate dining area: a small room with a high window that looks out onto the foliage of the garden. A table, four chairs, and a couple of shelves holding some pieces of earthenware, on two of which the same doubtless magnetized word can be read: Solitude. door jamb is transformed seamlessly into a cross. The upper part of the transition space is used to house a small storage space. This place for things, like several others arranged in different parts of the house, offers in its simplicity and apparent usefulness one of the keys to the conception that underlies the entire composition: that of essential bareness. A stripping down that allows both the spaces and the objects that inhabit them to find their own respiration, their exact resonance. The domestic discourse formulated by the few elements that the eye perceives depends on a deliberate laconism, on a display that draws its power from absence as well as from presence. An exploration of the nex-
us of domestic spaces reveals a series of receptacles of different characteristics and capacities, designed to contain a store of artistic, decorative, and utilitarian elements that constitute an ample reserve of resources to add a nuance to a setting, emphasize a composition, or simply make the house more livable: a heater for cold days, a series of prints of Renaissance plazas, African and Mexican colonial sculptures, wooden benches, paintings, a terrifying cauldron, a huge collection of newspaper and magazine clippings carefully mounted on pieces of cardboard, dishes of all kinds, screens, carefully selected. fabrics ... and the list goes on. Thus, underlying every arrangement seen by the eye, behind every nook and corner equipped with certain things, there is a narrative, an invisible vein of possibilities that await the hand of the master of the house, which will arrange in a different way the settings in which everyday life takes place. This subterranean current of THE HOUSE OF LUIS BARRAGAN
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different things associated with the life taking place inside the house and with the inhabitant of it forms a sort of subconscious (called thus ironically by Barragan himself), of whose richness and complexity barely a few glimpses are provided. In any case, the network of repositories and storage spaces in the house bears permanent witness to the fact that the tense equilibrium of the visible sustains its misesen-scene though the wealth of elements that nourish it, though it be manifested in just a few reticent objects.
SERVANT’S QUARTERS
The kitchen is defined by an efficient and practical approach to daily life. There is no romantic or sentimental dressing up of the fruits of the earth: adequate surfaces, plenty of light, advanced technology (for its time), almost aseptic cleanliness, and lots of room. The window panes which, if they were not frosted, would offer a view of the garden (and the garden within) lend a sense DEVICE FOR AN EPIPHANY
of pragmatic self-absorption typical of the lifestyle of Barragan’s generation, both dependent on servants and yet aloof and alien to them. Able, on a certain level, to establish solid and respectful, even warm, relations with the servants, but manifested indifferently, indeed almost neutrally, in the architectural discourse. Inevitably, the spatial and expressive richness of the house encounters here, in the kitchen, a zone of exclusion and strangeness, a reflection of the customs and limitations of the time. The kitchen communicates with a passageway leading to a rather extravagant spiral staircase that rises through two floors and issues laboriously into the servants’ quarters. An apartment all on its own, with three rooms and two patios, carefully arranged lighting and ventilation, spaciousness. An area in which other existences, those of the servants, can find their own rhythms and ambiences, summarily connected with the general life of the house. A parallel but intimately interde-
IV View of the architecture studio.
“HUMAN LIFE DEPRIVED OF BEAUTY IS NOT WORTHY OF BEING CALLED SO.” -LB
pendent dwelling: with its delicately proportioned windows, its materials of the same rustic nobility, its canaries singing under the eaves, and its plants lovingly cultivated in flowerpots. Indeed, this domain is much closer to the second patios of old colonial mansions in Guadalajara than to the mean servants’ quarters of the residences of the new Mexican bourgeoisie. The same passageway that leads to the spiral staircase opens onto the garage. Again, the abundance of spaces in which to store things is striking and the careful utilitarian arrangement of an architect who is also an engineer can be observed again. The 1957 Cadillac is another statement. Confident, powerful, and indifferently demode subject to the frequently irregular extra-urban peregrinations of its owner, spacious and comfortable. At some point the original upholstery must have been replaced by another, eminently practical and plastic. From the garage, a small door leads back, almost furtively, to the vestibule.
DINING The visual warmth of this space dedicated to another of the senses is remarkable. A horizontal window, which evokes a still life, frames the most shaded part of the garden. Two glass bottles stand in the embrasure, the transparence of their watery contents serving to multiply the effects of the light filtering through the branches that shelter the house from the afternoon sun. This is perhaps the most festive, extroverted space in the house. It is not by chance that its purpose as a place for dinners was sometimes taken over by other spaces in the house. The intensity of the pink both competes and combines with the colors of the large painting by Chucho Reyes that seems to dominate the composition. Nevertheless, there are some shelves along the wall perpendicular to the window on which a series of carefully selected pieces of ceramic ware-some of them from Sayula-provides a concrete and timeless commentary on the food THE HOUSE OF LUIS BARRAGAN
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and its recipients, on the actions and gestures that accompany and give life to the breaking of bread.
LOCKS AND JOINTS The dining room communicates directly with the vestibule, as we have said, or with the breakfast nook and thence with the kitchen. Nevertheless, there are different ways to approach spac es, to establish routes. A discreet door also leads to what the French call a sas: a tiny vestibule which, apart from containing yet another receptacle for any number of things, offers a choice: to enter, or return to, the living room, rearranged by the servants during the meal for the continuation of the evening, or to go out suddenly into the garden. These transitions, which seek to accentuate and compress a spatial experience, are repeated in different ways in several parts of the house. The ceiling comes down as far as it can (Barragan himself grazed it), the dimensions contract, the light fades: then comes the surprise, or perhaps the DEVICE FOR AN EPIPHANY
revelation, of reaching the other side. This accent on passage, this emphasis on transition, seems to insist again and again on underlining the different characters of each space, on turning the page, so that the senses can receive new stimul . This is where you read, this is where you eat, this is where you converse, this is where you dream....
THE BEDROOMS From the vestibule, the stone stairway leads to a first landing, where Mathias Goeritz’s painting reflects one by one the presences that pass by. Thus enveloped, if imperceptibly, in the golden aura, the visitor has two options. One is to continue to the guest room, guarded by an angel, also of gold. There, a Madonna and Child, with their crossing gazes, watch over the sleep of the visitor. The other alternative is to turn with the passageway, climb a few steps, and reach another sas. This bifurcation leads to the bedroom that Barragan called “the white room,� his very
V View of the hallway leading into vestibule.
“NOSTALGIA IS THE POETIC AWARNESS OF OUR PERSONAL PAST, AND SINCE THE ARTIST’S OWN PAST IS THE MAINSPRING OF HIS CREATIVE POTENTIAL, THE ARCHITECT MUST LISTEN AND HEED HIS NOSTALGIC REVELATIONS.” -LB
own. The white room overlooks one side of the property and is articulated in two different areas: one of them receives the light of the two high windows that look onto the garden of the Ortega house (light to which Barragan laid claim in detail-as he did to that of other windows-in the purchase deed). This space contains a table and countless possibilities for light, which is broken up and filtered by a system of shutters. The other area, partly separated by a screen, has a horizontal window whose dimensions were modified several times, judging by an examination of the garden façade. There is a bed, or rather a divan, and an armchair; a painting of the English school with a magnificent horse, another of St. Francis of Assisi by Chucho Reyes, and another with gilding; a record player, and yet another of those ubiquitous silver spheres. The divan and the horse, facing the armchair, are engaged perhaps in composing a single theory of contemplations, evocations, and companies. The architect’s
own room is presided over by an Annunciation: an oil that accompanied Barragan his entire life. A tear on the surface, the result of some past aggression, has been crudely repaired. Across from it is the narrow and unusually long bed, a night table, and an armchair. No other place in the house is so clear in its astringently monastic intentions. A tiny screen, with successive portraits of a black girl-who once passed through the house-accompanies the collection of records stored there. The cypress wood wardrobe that runs along one wall contains a drawer in which Barragan safeguarded certain books of his predilection to the end of his life. (They include those of Bae, of course, and Claudel’s L’Annoncfeo ite aM arie.) The small size of the cypress wood wardrobe is surprising, capable as it was of containing all the clothing of a consummate dandy (but a discreet one, as the old canons of elegance in Guadalajara would demand). Above, a solitary blue Talavera urn. But one’s gaze THE HOUSE OF LUIS BARRAGAN
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turns insistently to the figure of the young woman, haloed in light, whom the angel surprises: it was in this room, under her protection, that her faithful devotee closed his eyes for the last time.
THE TERRACE AND THE ASCENT
Nothing prepares one, in the room on the other side of the bedrooms, for the radical turn of the screw that is coming. An interruption in the back wall barely allows a person to ascend a few steps that issue onto a double door. One part is of glass, tinted a sort of yellow; the other part, superposed, is a wooden grille closed with a bolt from the immense intimacy that awaits outside. The rooftop terrace of Luis Barragan’s house is one of x the fundamental spaces of twentieth-century art. It contains, it alone, all the sky granted to the Valley of Mexico. Its walls and bulwarks, masterfully handled, appropriate with their dimensions, their colors, and their deliberately meditated interrelations DEVICE FOR AN EPIPHANY
the ultimate purity and all the infinite distance confined by the air. It should not surprise that, whenever some neighboring tree begin to peek out, the architect would have it pruned to avoid any other vista than that of the firmament in transit to appear there. (An old foreman who worked for Barragan has recounted how the architect used to say as he stood there: “Look, Pianito, since we are atop the highest building in Mexico City .... “) The appropriation of the sky implied by the rooftop terrace is a radical and indeed Promethean gesture. It is not so unlike the spirit of those acropolises, such as Monte Alban, that seek to confer reason, homage, and measure on the infinite. The terrace is the house turned over on itself, stripped of circumstances and minutiae, integrally emptied, like an offering to pure space. With a few walls, two colors, and the air, its inscribes on the cosmic becoming its attempt to be no more than a hollow in which pity and grace find their place. Only the sun and its litur-
VI View of vestibule and staircase leading to room in second floor.
gies, the fleeting clouds, the turning stars, and an occasional lively bird inhabit this unrepeatable plenitude. (And the airplanes that arrive from the north leave their trace above the highest reaches of the water tower.) This is where the girls danced, so they say.
THE POSSIBILITY OF EACH ITINERARY
“IT IS ESSENTIAL TO AN ARCHITECT TO KNOW HOW TO SEE: I MEAN, TO SEE IN SUCH A WAY THAT THE VISION IS NOT OVERPOWERED BY RATIONAL ANALYSIS.” -LB
And back to the troje, its compartments, its irreducible unity unfolding beneath the even rhythm of the high beams, awash in light. From the rooftop to the gilt painting in the passageway, then to the corridor of the angel and suddenly to the mezzanine level with its shadow, its protective gesture, and safe! A yellowing diploma hung carelessly on the wall attests to the fact that Luis Barragan Morfin was a civil engineer. Other compartments, a low door, a wooden staircase that descends at the end to the books, to the armchair in which the architect would spend his finest hours. There are many ways to come to shore in these waters. A ingle large book case groups and organizes I
the library that Barragan carefully assembled in the course of his life: its labyrinths and bifurcations nourished every step in his career. The tour of the house is interrupted under its shadow. (It is 1963 and Ursula Bernath has come to take some photos. The architect comes and goes, looks for his place, poses at the foot of the stairs, then goes up them. He returns to his armchair, looks for something under the pile of books, papers, and objects of varied provenance and destination, amidst all the “Tapatian” clutter-relearned so well from his dear friend Chucho Reyes-that covers the low table, raises his glasses, looks at the camera. The years pass and at the end of the maelstrom it is that same photograph that now rests on a lectern, on the same low table. Next to it, a blond woman also looks at the camera).
THE COUNTLESS INGENIOUS CONTRIVANCES
In spite of its apparent simplicity, an examination of the house and its different spaces reveals an unTHE HOUSE OF LUIS BARRAGAN
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suspected number of contrivances that allow each space to be lived in and minutely perceived with the precise intention, the exact nuance that Barragan himself was looking for. The quality and arrangement of these ingenious devices call to mind the early training of the architect and his sure professional sense of solving problems with efficiency and practical sense. As an engineer, whose thresholds of refinement and demand effaced the limits between the pragmatic and the obviously artistic. This engineering of the senses is exercised in the house in all kinds of specific situations and applications. Whether it be the regulation of the flow of water in a fountain, the light controlled in very different ways by the shutters or filtered through successive curtains of different kinds and qualities, the lamps that go from simple and obvious to refined, the arrangement of certain pieces of furniture that make for com fort without invading one’s vision, the systems to close doors and closets with maximum visual economy and practicality, the walls DEVICE FOR AN EPIPHANY
and windows that ensure seamless harmony, the switches concealed in various places under the cover of tables, which allow a servant to be called for a coffee or another bottle of champagne without altering the particular chemistry of the conversation .... Everything in the house seeks to achieve a certain atmosphere, a given stillness, a luminous serenity that encourages the coming of the fullest moment. That moment at which the passage of time transfigures its monotony into joyful celebrations of life as it happens, into silent and jubilant epiphanies, open to transcendence. The house functions thus by means of an invisible accumulation. The tools of its trade are silence, the sound of water or of the wind in the branches, the sure intimacy of confined spaces mysteriously open to the other, the essential refinement of materials and objects arranged with the most laborious naturalness, the reticent grammar of carefully determined colors and textures, the formal and spatial purity pursued to the extremes of secret delirium. Both the soul sister
VI Iluminated space in the architecture studio.
“SERENITY IS THE GREAT AND TRUE ANTIDOTE AGAINST ANGUISH AND FEAR, AND TODAY MORE THAN EVER, IT IS THE ARCHITECT’S DUTY TO MAKE OF IT A PERMANENT GUEST IN THE HOME, NO MATTER HOW SUMPTUOUS OR HOW HUMBLE .” -LB
and the contrary of this obsessive quest, we find scattered here and there about the house the traces of disorder-an old friend from his native Jaliscowhich discreetly reveals Barragan’s absolute indifference to bourgeois notions and “architect” conventions ( to whose affectations he would sometimes refer thus, with vague disdain). All this was the result of a slow, continual, and developing process of trial and modification. It is possible to document, from the initial purchase of the lot on Madereros, the meticulous rearrangements of the gardens, the construction of the first house, the change of domicile to the present dwelling, a long series of attempts, hesitant at times, at time sure, of comings and goings, of agreements and ruptures that resulted, more than half a century later, in the house at Francisco Ramirez no. 14 that Luis Barragan bequeathed as his testimony. It might be, for example, in the troje-library. From its unitary space to the aforementioned partitions and the large panes of glass that years later would give it its definitive
expression. It might be the fac;ade that opens to the west, onto the garden, in which can be read the successive attempts by the architect to find the exact proportions and functioning of the window. It might be the drawing workshop of the contiguous studio, in which a great blind wall replaced the large window that looked obliquely across the garden; behind that wall, Barragan arranged the patio of the earthenware pots, open only to the sky and to the limitless profundities of the dark water of the strange deep pool. (And sometimes the architect submerged the pots and pitchers in the water, leaving only the twin surfaces of the stone and the water in repose.) It might be the garden itself, which was originally a serene meadow surrounding the reclining pirul, and then the place where a hundred-year-old olive tree (called “the ballerina”) sunk its roots, and later a clearing in the woods, surrounded by high grass, with the perpetual advance of the hosts of a jasmine bush from the imperceptible distance of the lot... It might be the rooftop terTHE HOUSE OF LUIS BARRAGAN
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race, which originally overlooked the garden, with a low parapet of wooden planks, later replaced by the wall that ensured the unique supremacy of the sky; or the other wall, which looks north, into whose rubblework Barragan once had a large cross forged: years later he had it effaced. But when the rains last long enough and fall in one direction, the shadow of the cross can be seen, when the downpour ceases, outlined on the bare wall. A laboratory, a box of surprises, a safety vault of visions and memories, a clear outlook from which the future can be seen with tranquil hope: the program of a house. Through this prolonged exercise in achieving an unrepeatable place on earth, where one can watch time pass and friends arrive, navigate among loves, work through memories, inquire into books and things, cultivate the nearness of trees and plants, Luis Barragan was able to attend with serenity to the approach of death and to cherish the reticent and joyful hope of a surer life. DEVICE FOR AN EPIPHANY
TEACHING AND DURATION It is said that masterpieces are those that show the possibility, the depth, the fertile transcendence of an artistic exercise that with the gravitation of its presence contributes permanently to changing, to improving life. Works that produce beauty that bring the world to light. Through a chain of visions, of successive interpretations, of intercrossing influences that renew the vigor of the works, they reaffirm their mastery across the generations. With regard to the conservation and proximity of certain houses, of certain works. Umberto Eco has written: “We do not read Shakespeare as he wrote. Our Shakespeare is much richer than the one read in his time. For a masterpiece to be a masterpiece, it must be known, that is, it must have absorbed all of the interpretations it has provoked, which contribute to making it what it is. An unknown masterpiece has not had enough readers, readings, interpretations.” And Jean-Claude Carriere adds: “A masterpiece is
VIII Room with Christ.
“THE CERTAINTY OF DEATH IS THE SPRING OF ACTION AND THEREFORE OF LIFE, AND IN THE IMPLICIT RELIGIOUS ELEMENT IN THE WORK OF ART, LIFE TRIUMPHS OVER DEATH.” -LB
not born a masterpiece, but rather becomes one. It must be added, moreover, that the great works are reciprocally contagious thanks to us.” Luis Barragan once said that it was advisable to make portraits of architecture. “You will see: papers last longer than stones.” On another occasion, pressed by some students who wanted to drink up his works whole, to visit each one of his productions, he said with a touch of irony: “Don’t worry so much about seeing what Barragan did; try rather to see what Barragan saw.” The scene took place on the terrace that unites and separates the great garden window, and time was doubtless being told by tequilas. A silence that persists to this day followed his words. Many years later the apprenticeship continues, while the lights of another city illuminate the wrinkled plans, covered with annotations, of that house so often visited, which we try in vain to decipher. A masterpiece. One that, in the successive and changing vision of those who examine it over the years, ever different and ever new, pursues its I
work in time and memory, its vital teachings.
It was one of the last times that the architect, gravely ill, could still walk with difficulty about his house. It was a long session that ended in the afternoon. From the library to the terrace, the garden, the workshop, and back again. With his typically cordial manners and ease, with the warmth and discretion of a gentleman, Barragan bade farewell to his visitor. Standing at the back of the vestibule, his tall svelte figure waved a hand and his dark silhouette was outlined clearly against the explosive color of the vestibule wall. Time was running out: that was clear. And a purpose then was also made clear: somehow everything that made up this house was bound to last. And lasted it has.
THE HOUSE OF LUIS BARRAGAN
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