the regional approach

land scape architecture

the regional approach Prof. Antonio di Campli

USAC, Turin, 7 june 2012

regional approach critical to rational modernism postcolonialism

Roberto Burle Marx, 1909-1994 The Regional Approach

Brazil teems with jungles, forests and all sorts of exotic plants, flowers and trees.

But until the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx came along to tame and shape his country’s exuberant flora, his countrymen had mostly disdained the natural riches that, often literally, flourished in their own backyards.

Burle Marx created tropical landscaping as we know it today, but in doing so he also did something even greater.

By organizing native plants in accordance with the aesthetic principles of the artistic vanguard, especially Cubism and abstractionism, he created a new and modern grammar for international landscape design.

He was truly a polymath, but the thing about him that really stands out is that he regarded landscape design as an equal partner with architecture, not as a backdrop or decoration, and elevated it to that level.

For his part, Burle Marx always thought of himself first and foremost as a painter, which explains the abundance of canvases in the show. Landscape design, he once wrote, “was merely the method I found to organize and compose my drawing and painting, using less conventional materials.�

It was while studying painting in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as he would later tell it, that Burle Marx realized that the vegetation Brazilians then dismissed as scrub and brush, preferring imported pine trees and gladioli for their gardens, was truly extraordinary. Visiting the Botanical Garden in Berlin, he was startled to find many Brazilian plants in the collection and quickly came to see the untapped artistic potential in their varied shapes, sizes and hues.

He truly had a painter’s eye, which you could sense in his superb sense of color and form, and he had an understanding of the tenets of Modernism and Dada, having clearly known and studied the work of people like Hans Arp. He moved easily from one creative domain to another, his landscape design methods were often influenced by his experiments with new techniques in other areas such as painting, weaving or fabric dying, and he often integrated his own artworks in his landscape projects.

For Burle Marx’s thought and practice are intimately linked with the Modernist construction of Brazil’s national identity, and his enchanting landscapes have had an enduring influence on the creation of the modern image of Brazil.

A self-taught botanist and expert horticulturist with several species named after him, Burle Marx travelled throughout Brazil and in South and Central Asia, observing plants in their natural habitats and searching for new species for his tropical gardens. At his laboratory, the Sítio Santo Antônio da Bica in Barra de Guaratiba, he collected more than 3,500 different species, and grew, studied and multiplied himself the plants he used in his projects.

Burle Marx’s expeditions and plant discoveries contributed in a very literal way to the Brazilian Modernists’ second discovery of Brazil aimed to define the ingredients of brasilidade (Brazilianness) and to achieve cultural emancipation.

Avenida Atlantica During the construction and urbanization of Avenida Atlântica (1905-06), along Copacabana’s curved, sandy beach, Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos imported both skilled craftsmen and stone from Portugal to pave the oceanfront promenade.

The Portuguese artisans followed patterns typical of the distinctive paving of Portuguese walkways (calçada à portuguesa), entirely covered in alternating black-and-white waves composed of small stones cut and laid by hand. In his project for the renovation and extension of the pavements of Avenida Atlântica (Calçadão de Copacabana, 1969-72), Burle Marx retained the original pattern on the beachfront pavement - only accentuating the curves - preserving the memory of the colonial metropolis.

For the new pavements on the opposite side of the seafront and on the islands at the centre of the avenue, however, he used the same black and white stones combined with a red one to compose a magnificent four-kilometre-long abstract mosaic that pays tribute to the colonial artisan tradition - the old motif at times reappears in the form of fragmentary quotations .

Parque Aterro do Flamengo and Parque del Este Parque Aterro do Flamengo, in Rio (1959-63), and Parque del Este in Caracas, Venezuela (19571963) remain among the major urban green areas realized in Latin America in the 20th century.

Burle Marx created complex plant compositions - what he called” artificial ecological associations”where exotic plants from different tropical countries would find expression in many possible permutations among the Brazilian natives, regardless of their original genotype or taxonomy.

If their morphology or physical characteristics (phenotype) could be integrated visually and artistically to their advantage, the overall ecological distortion would not be, for him, so to speak, a sin.

Even if Burle Marx gave priority to native plants, nature for him was always a pre-text, a point of departure.

Plants found elsewhere under similar climatic and pedological conditions would always find a place with their” fellow” natives, and thus contribute to the creation of strikingly new, contrasting associations.

Artificial ecological associations are to be found in all his projects, not only in these two parks.

In Parque del Este, Burle Marx used an existing forest to shelter the growth of a whole new community of native and non-native species.

Parque del Este (Park of the East) officially Parque Generalísimo Francisco de Miranda is an urban park of 0.82 km² in the east of Caracas. It Opened in 1961).

The 200-acre park was divided into three sections—a series of meandering paths linking collections of plants, a large gathering space, and a series of walled patios.

Plants were grouped into separate representations of Venezuelan ecosystems, organized for visual effect based upon abstract relationships conceived on canvas.

In describing Burle Marx’s style, we can see an “impulse towards form”, something abstract, nonrepresentational, distinct from its context and a an impulse towards “process, contingency, and the solicitation of chance and change.”

Parque del Este

Parque del Este is comprised primarily of three spaces.

The first is an open, fluid landscape of grass fields with a subtle and gently undulating topography and loosely laid-out canopy trees, popularly used for picnics and games.

The second is a forested, spatially dense landscape with meandering paths, used primarily for strolling and quiet contemplation.

The third is a sequence of paved, intimate, courtyard gardens that reference the Spanish colonial past of Venezuelan culture and display plants, tiled murals, and water works.

Within each of these spaces visitors are confronted with the rich variety and exuberance of tropical flora, with a small but significant zoological collection of species from different regions of Venezuela, and with places that afford a broad spectrum of social activities and recreational programs.

The process of combining types, modes of representation, and technologies in ways that lead to new aesthetic practices, ones that are inclusive of the old and the new, the foreign and the local, the traditional and the modern, is by now understood as a defining trait across all artistic practices in the 20th century culture of Latin America

Parque del Este follows neither the contemplative, picturesque, nineteenth-century park type, nor the recreational, heavily programmed, twentieth-century park, although it shares some qualities of each.

The search for ecological hybridity involves the combining native and non-native species in the plant assemblages. Hybridization is also methodology and it has to do with combining formalism, the inscription on the land of non site-specific forms, with process, a working method that works with visual phenomena and time, allowing changing relationships between color and light, and ecological processes to create their effects on the site.

FORMAL HYBRIDITY: Combining types Burle Marx projected the plant collections in the park as complex plant assemblages, each one devoted to the representation of a Venezuelan ecosystem. There is the xerophytic garden with its collection of euphorbias, aloes, agaves, and yuccas; the hygrophytic garden for the display of aquatic plants, such as Nymphea and Thalias; the garden representative of the tropical rain forest; the palmetum, for the display of palms; the arboretum, for the display of autochthonous trees, and, the garden of the urban courtyard, the patios. Amid these collections are an aviary, a terrarium for the display of reptiles, and sunken gardens for the display of tigers, monkeys, crocodiles, and other representative fauna. Each collection is spatially and experientially autonomous, and connected by a fluid network of meandering paths.

For the patios, a reference to the Spanish colonial house, and the Moorish gardens before that, Burle Marx used generously scaled concrete walls, lined with tile on the interior side only, to enclose a series of three interconnecting rooms.

The first patio in the sequence is a calm, aqueous, cool garden. The focus here is the walls, each one of which is an elaborate surface of blue, yellow, and white glazed, 4” x 4” tiles. Water cascades from concrete trays cantilevered from the walls, and falls into rectangular reflecting pools at the base of the walls. Plants and benches are used sparingly in this room, as free-standing sculptural forms on the paved ground.

The second room, the red and white garden, is a powerful and dramatic contrast to the first. The bright red, 1’ x 1”, tiles on the walls are backdrop to a rich collection of plant material, including Dracena, agave angustifolia, lantana camara, euphorbia leucocephala, that either blooms in white or has variegated green and white foliage. The white flowers and leaves are further emphasized by the use of rocks of similar color and the paving pattern. A meandering path that leads around the plant and rock assemblages unfolds a rich display of shapes, textures, and surfaces.

The third garden in the sequence, the largest, is not bounded by concrete walls and opens outward to a flat lawn terrace and a stage backed by a dramatic water curtain. While in principle this lawn is the spectator space where visitors sit to watch performances, it was not conceived as a flat, empty lawn. Instead, the surface was animated, and thus objectified, through the use of two species of grass, the darker green Stenotaphrum forming a grid of circles against a lighter variety, giving the surface a hybrid function of program surface and graphic parterre. The backdrop for this hybrid lawn-parterre is a colossal water curtain that forms the north boundary of the space. The water curtain, about ten meters high and 60 meters wide, is the backdrop for a performance stage that floats on a reflecting pool.

In the courtyards Burle Marx did not follow the traditional spatial configuration which distinguishes between the perimeter, devoted to circulation, and the symmetrical space of the center, typically occupied by a fountain. Instead, in the courtyards these relationships are reversed: water is displaced to the perimeter, and circulation is free, unstructured, and through the center. These are courtyards radically transformed into strolling gardens. The use of tiles in the walls reference Spanish and Portuguese architecture, but their disposition and color reflect Burle Marx’s modern sensibility.

Furthermore, the walls of the traditional patios, conceptually a definitive boundary, are here dissolved and dematerialized into light, deep shadows, water, reflections, and sound. Finally, the traditional domestic and refined scale and texture associated with the courtyard garden are replaced by an abstract, graphic, tough, urban language. The patios are, in effect, the conjunction of the domestic courtyard of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial house, the urban plaza, and the promenade of the modern house and of the English landscape garden.

ECOLOGICAL HYBRIDITY: Native and Non-Native One of the important contributions of Burle Marx’s work was the application of ecological principles to the design of urban sites.

A life-long environmentalist, he insisted on the use an appreciation of native flora, criticizing the introduction of the more fashionable European species in the gardens of the urban elite. With ecologists, he traveled to the rain forest, collected, acclimatized, and propagated plants in greenhouses before introducing them into urban areas. Forty species of tropical bear his name. Likewise, Burle Marx thought of the plant collections at Parque del Este as ecological gardens of autochthonous Venezuelan plants. However, his use of ecological principles at Parque del Este is varied and heterogeneous, combining approaches to achieve a didactic agenda as well as his own aesthetic effects.

Burle Marx departed from the original ecological model, as he saw it in each plant’s native habitat in two ways.

The first is through the introduction of non-autochthonous species to increase the visual and didactic richness of the collection. For example, in the xerophytic garden, Burle Marx introduced exotic species that, although botanically very different, were biological forms that were adapted to similar environmental conditions. Thus, there are cactuses from the Venezuelan, African, and American desert displayed together. Similarly, in the palmetum, there are both native and exotic palms, from as far away places as China, Africa, Hawaii, and California. A shrub variety of erythrina, (Erythrina abyssinica), a primary species growing on the site as canopy for the previously existing coffee plantation, was imported from Africa for its beautiful red flowers. The examples are numerous, and include many species brought from Brazil by Burle Marx himself. Burle Marx also introduced plants to create zones of vegetal transition at the edge of each garden in order to create a gradient of textures between one type of landscape and an adjacent one. These transitional plants were chosen for their morphological characteristics only, and not for their ecological associations. For instance Hemerocallis fulva (daylily), a non-native species, was introduced at the edge of the hygrophytic garden to provide a scale transition from the aquatic plants to the lawn areas around it. And at the edges of the xerophytic garden he planted specimens of Spondias purpurea (Ciruela de huesito) because its contorted branches and coarse texture would provide a transition between the coarse xerophytic plants and the finer texture of the trees in the adjacent arboretum. Burle Marx also displayed the same plant in different growing conditions, showing the plant’s adaptability to changing environmental conditions. For example, Philodendron melinonii grows typically as an epiphytic in is natural environment in the rain forests, but can also grow in soil, both conditions of which are displayed at the park . Burle Marx engages plants and ecology, then, as a material practice. By this I mean that he does not merely place plants on the site, he engages their biological capacities, pointing to their adaptive performance as living material. Like an engineer who stretches a beam to its maximum structural capacity, or a painter who explores the thinnest (or thickest) possible layer of pigment to cause various effects, so does Burle Marx work with plants in normal and extreme conditions, displaying the limits of their ecological performance.

METHODOLOGICAL HYBRIDITY: Form + process Roberto Burle Marx is known equally well for his unprecedented use of tropical flora and for the highly developed formal vocabulary of his work. Burle Marx imposed non-naturalistic, abstract, nonrepresentational, arbitrary forms on the land, composing them according to an a priori formal logic that, while inflected slightly by site conditions, remains distinct from its context.

His extensive use of the curve to structure the plan across all scales and in the great majority of the work of the early decades of his career became his hallmark.

However, for Burle Marx, the plan was merely a way to enter a project. The way the plan works, what it enables spatially and materially in the real space of the park, is as important, if not more, as the way it looks as a composition on paper. More fundamentally than merely a “curvilinear plan,� it can be described as a study of the distribution and densities of the curves--smaller, tighter, and denser in the eastern half of the site, larger and more transparent in the western half. The curves work as a series of formal configurations that operate in a system-like way, that is, as a field of self-similar forms that vary in size and density to enable local conditions of difference to emerge within the larger organization of the plan. Further, the curves are the primary field or unifying matrix in the plan, within which emerge the intricate and complex spatial and material effects mentioned earlier. A secondary field, the existing forest of Erythrina on the eastern half of the site, works to produce further conditions of difference at several scales. Together, the two fields are a frame against which multiple material and visual complexity in the park will unfold.

The curvilinear interlocking shapes of the plan are not perceived as such in space.

Layering and juxtaposition, along with the viewer’s own movement, make the curves always fragmented and partial.

From any given point, the curves’ tight radii make it impossible to perceive the entire form completely.

The forms are revealed through movement and time.

With regards to the use of color and texture in the planting design, Burle Marx engaged color to produce shifts in the perception of depth, color, and background and foreground. “The value of a plant in a composition, like the value of color in a painting, is always relative.

In Aterro do Flamengo, built on reclaimed seafront, he adopted an empty landfill exposed to seasonal salty winds to test the pioneering and adaptative capacities of a wide range of trees and palms growing in nature in the most adverse conditions.

The Aterro do Flamengo,is Rio’s largest urban park. It is also one of the projects that exemplify his understanding of the social role and democratizing function of public gardens in the modern city.

Both parks remain today a successful ecological experiment, a sort of botanical garden but of a unique kind. Here, unusual species are recognizable not from a label on the ground, but from their distinction, in terms of relative placement and massing.

Aterro do Flamengo

As it is well known, the trademark of Burle Marx was to cluster in large numbers plants of the same species.

The conceptual idea behind this was that the multiplication of one plant in a large group of the same species would magnify its characteristic form or intrinsic beauty, making it easier for people to notice it and emotionally appreciate.

Burle Marx believed that the collection, identification, propagation, and re-composition of the Brazilian flora in urban parks in such large masses and such striking compositions would in the end help turn the wilderness of the feared Mata Atlântica, Brazil’s endangered environment, into an intimate experience that everybody could understand, value, and therefore protect.

Therefore, a more direct and abbreviated relationship with nature could be established in the park, one that would exemplify the elementary play of natural forces in a more human and less threatening environment. In other words, by transforming the textures and colors of the forest into comprehensible, human-scale experiences that elicit an emotional response from the park visitor, he was hoping to educate the masses by the thousands, and to confer what Bardi has called an” urban dimension” to Brazilian nature. This would be a means to perpetuate nature in an increasingly urbanized world.

The clustering of large masses of trees and palms in the Aterro do Flamengo has other functions, and include legibility and visual impact for those who experience the park by driving at relatively high speed along the park-way.

The tree masses also create an important rhythm and articulation of solids and voids in an otherwise homogenous horizon. In Parque del Este the situation was not the same, as half of the park was created using an existing forest, thus native trees were often planted in small numbers to integrate an already existing canopy. Moreover, Parque del Este does not afford ocean views as Flamengo does: the trees in that park often, rather than framing good view, create an effective screening of the middle-ground horizon of the city cluttered with tall building of dubious architecture

Burle Marx felt the necessity to create a viveiro or nursery area within his parks, both during constructing and after its completion, to insure the continuous supply of otherwise difficult-to-find plants.

This was a place where live material collected from the excursions would be acclimatized and kept under observation for several months, before transplanting on site. If only seeds or one-two specimens were obtained from the wild, and if a many were necessary in the design instead, the waiting time was often years. That is the reason why Parque Flamengo was still being planted fifteen years after its inauguration. And is also the reason why Parque del Este lost gradually a huge number of plants from its original collections as the viveiro closed and was abandoned. The viveiro would be a place under direct supervision of the botanist collaborating in the project, and would become a laboratory for training workers and maintenance staff on how to propagate, cultivate and care for the plants of the park.

Pampulha Museum Gardens / Pampulha Complex, Belo Horizonte (1940) The tropical gardens he created for Niemeyer’s pioneering group of buildings at Pampulha (Belo Horizonte, 1940-43), for example, amplify the architectural call to hedonism and useless sensual pleasure, becoming emblematic of Niemeyer’s transgression into forbidden territories beyond the boundaries of the functionalist utopia. As Bernard Tschumi noted in 1977, “built exclusively for delight, gardens are like the earliest experiments in that part of architecture that is so difficult to express with words or drawings; pleasure and eroticism. Whether romantic or classical, gardens merge the sensual pleasure of space with the pleasure of reason, in a most useless manner”. In Brazil, Burle Marx’s Modernist gardens invoke, appropriate and radicalize the visions of the Garden of Eden inspired by the discovery of the country by the Portuguese, the milieu of Michel de Montaigne’s ideal republic of the native Indians of Brazil, “a nation” with “no occupation but that of idleness” .Burle Marx’s modern paradisiacal tropical gardens took over what “was originally an ideological edifice imposed by colonizers” and turned it into a means to subvert catechizing architectural discourses, exceed rationalist decorum and overcome the puritanical denunciation of pleasure

Igreja de S達o Francisco

Museu de arte

PARQUE IBIRAPUERA Sﾃグ PAULO 1953

El Sitio Santo Antonio da Bica

Luis Barragan, 1902-1988 The Regional Approach

The name Luis Barragan evokes images of Latin American modernism-brightly colored plain surfaces set off against lush foliage.

Cuadra San Cristobรกl,โ จLos Clubes, 1966-68

Egerström House – Mexico City

Fuente de los Amantes,
Los Clubes, 1966

Torres SatĂŠlite, Mexico City, 1957

Gardens at El Pedregal Barragan’s 1,250-acre Gardens of El Pedregal, begun in 1945 on the lava fields of south of Mexico City, were dotted with houses and plazas, fountains and ponds, cacti and pepper trees.

Barragan considered El Pedregal his most important project, and critics have described the houses and gardens there as a turning point in Mexican architecture.

Luis Barragan found the quality of the garden enhanced by its exclusivity and enclosed character and defined the garden as a refuge from hectic urban life.

In El Pedregal, the Ur-landscape of the Mexican lava desert is pictorialised and made inhabitable.

Various means were used by the designers of these places to make connections to the material aspects of the landscape, and the symbolic meanings that these engendered within a Mexican artistic milieu.

These devices ranged from the prosaic: the use of indigenous plants and materials local to the area, to highly intellectualised interpretations of the site’s essential character; in one case through abstract means engaged with a timeless present and in the other through explicitly regional and nationalist narratives.

Isolated outcrops of black volcanic rock litter the private gardens and public spaces of the southwestern suburbs of Mexico City.

These are the remnants of a once vast and lonely plain of lava that rose from the city’s edge until its inundation in the second half of the twentieth century.

An anti-thesis to the urban, this wasteland was an unhomely and dangerous place.

Called El Pedregal (the stony place), its original physical appearance responded to Edmund Burke’s essential qualities of the sublime: a powerful aspect; uncertain boundaries; privation, vastness, and difficulty.

Dating from the beginning of Romanticism, a fascination with the aesthetic and sublime possibilities of this wild and scaleless landscape, and the minuteness and ephemerality of human habitation in comparison, was an artistic tradition in Mexico City.

El Pedregal attracted various artists during the two hundred years preceding its physical transformation in the 1950s.

Some were Mexican, such as the nineteenth-century painter Jose Maria Velasco, and others were artisttravellers, notably Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Rugendas.

Jose Maria Velasco, painting of Pedregal, late nineteeenth century

The Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco regularly painted groups of stolid peasants cowering amongst the rocks, or huddled outside their spartan dwellings dwarfed by cliffs.

In his painting Paisaje Metafisico, 1948, the presence of the sublime is drawn from the land to become a huge, threatening void, its blackness rigidly rectangular in a vast and brooding sky that looms over the wilderness, diminished in comparison.

Architects were also drawn to it; Juan O’Gorman and Hannes Meyer made prints and paintings of the rocky landscape in a state of exploitation, as the site of a mine, or touched by other forms of human intervention, maybe a road or a viaduct.

Jose Clemente Orozco, metaphysical landscape

It was in this seemingly uninhabitable place that architect and developer Luis Barragan decided in 1943, to site a group of experimental gardens, the first of his “landscapes of refuge�.

Initiating a fundamental transformation of the lava bed by making it inhabitable.

To do this he had to make a connection between the vast scale of the landscape and the relatively small scale of domestic spaces and constructions.

Guiding hisvision of El Pedregal were various artist friends.

In 1944 he saw photographs of the landscape in its raw state in an exhibition. This site was captured

by Armando Salas Portugal in an extraordinary white light, exotic plants and shapes appeared strange and enticing. He bought several of these photographs for his collection and began a collaborationwith Salas Portugal, whom he employed specifically to photograph his work at El Pedregal.

Armando Salas Portugal, The original Pedregal Landscape

The original domestic landscapes made in El Pedregal have been labelled ‘gardens as art’, an apt description, since the only way we can know them now is as a scene in a photograph.

None of the houses and gardens exist in their original form. Some have been completely razed by the encroaching city, whilst others have been transformed.

This intention was a quality captured later by the photojournalist Mayo brothers whose work appeared in numerous contemporary illustrated magazines with names like Novedades (Novelties), and the three unrelated publications: Hoy, Manana and Siempre (Today,Tomorrow and Always).

The plots of the Jardines del Pedregal were on sale to be lived in, and the show houses to explain how this could be done.

The Sublime and its Exploitation In his Pritzker Prize address in 1980 Barragan described how he had been “overwhelmed by the beauty of this landscape” in which he ‘decided to create a series of gardens to humanise [it], without destroying its magic’ , its quality of ‘rock melted by the onslaught of powerful prehistoric winds’ . He imagined El Pedre- gal as ‘a beautiful garden [where] the majesty of nature is ever present, but it is nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life’. This was enacted on a large and profitable scale in the colonisation of 865 acres of El Pedregal through the development and promotion of the upmarket housing development of the] jardines del Pedregal.

The public gardens at the Jardines del Pedregal were defined architecturally by relatively few small interventions. These included the Fuente de los Patos (Fountain for Ducks): a pond amongst the lava rocks featuring a jet of water, and several walkways amongst the rocks joined by hewn or laid flights of steps and widened platforms. The original principal entrance to the site (Fountain Square) and two auxiliary entrances were also designed by Barragan.

Plaza de los Fuentes (Fountain Square), contained the only figurative object that Barragan used there - a sculpture commissioned from the German artist Mathias Goeritz. The triumphant bellow of the ‘Pedregal Animal’, a giant lizard wresting itself from the ground, became an icon representing the development, used time and again in real estate advertisements for the Jardines del Pedregal which appeared in all the major Mexican newspapers.

The Plaza of the Fountains (1949) was the main entrance of the Gardens of El Pedregal

Plan for the Plaza of the Fountain

Mathias Goeritz: El animal, Jardines del Pedregal, MĂŠxico D.F., 1949

Garden 1: El Cabrio. Aestheticising the Wildemess In September 1943, Luis Barragan bought from Alberto Misrachi a small piece of land called ‘El Cabrio’ (the goat’s pen) on the fringes of El Pedregal. On it he constructed a complex of connecting garden spaces, enclosed and private.

These were gardens as a place for contemplation and conversation, situated in a strange nature, the inverse of bucolic.

The series of gardens constructed here was the first experiment by Barragan in the humanising of the Pedregal landscape. He made the gardens for his personal use, and his explicit desire was to create a retreat from the everyday life of the city. He considered urban life unbearably public, a psychic wasteland devoid of the spiritual and unsuited to the life of solitude and contemplation necessary to feel at home in the world. His dream land was an “antidote against anguish and fear” a place for “developing the personality and avoiding standardisation of the mind”.

At El Cabrio he took advantage of the volcanic landscape and vegetation to create three unique gardens where rocks grass, foliage and cacti, stone, sand and water are skillfully combined to form a garden fully integrated into the natural landscape.

El Cabrio, according to Emilio Ambasz, was ‘a marvellous terrain, populated by big evergreen oaks and bordering on the river Magdalena.

A few of El Pedregal’s rocky fingers reached into the land, rising twenty feet against the background of trees.’

By physically intervening onto the rocky surface, Barragan began to make a spatial and literal interpretation of both the detail of the extraordinary distorted ground surface and the wider view of the landscape which had been contemplated by artists for so long.

He explored the process of selectively flattening the ground using a traditional technique called tepatate, pressed earth and gravel, thereby making a way through the impassable uneven surface of the lava full of crevices, fissures and caves.

Again manipulating the resources of the site he used the water of the bordering river to feed pools and artificial waterfalls amongst which he placed figurines.

The placing of figure in the landscape was very important in Barragan’s work at El Pedregal in the way that it would be used to draw together disparate elements in a landscape. This was usually a visual experience, but it was also effected through sound or reflection.

A denial of perspectival spatial organisation is implicit in a large empty space, and objects can only be located in relation to each other, rather than placed as features in a regulated landscape.

Barragan’s strange objects resonated within the landscape at a domestic scale, not merely in contrast to it the vast with the human- but also in comparison with it- the regulated with the chaotic.

His manmade surfaces were smooth, and perhaps gridded, allowing the possibility of perspectival perception for the eye or the camera.

The winding streets were designed according to the urban concepts of the times, the English winding street concept that was used by architects such as Richard Neutra. Steps, garden paths, and water pools were carved into rock outcroppings and crevices. Here native flora grew easily on a layer of topsoil and created sharp, sensual contrast that heightened the beauty of the many-hued rock; transitions through areas of exotic contrast introduced an air of magic and mysteryto the gardens.

El Pedregal 1950, 1959 ,1980

Boundaries The making of boundaries was one of the most significant and interesting means by which Barragan subtly but unalterably changed the meaning and uses of the land.

From the time of the Aztecs a garden’s boundary had indicated social position; the owner of a walled garden enjoyed superior status to the cultivator of a Xochitla (flower place) contained by a cane fence.

Property limits were particularly precarious in a city floating on a lake, and ownership of physical territory was understandably ambiguous, a problem solved by the urban, grid-making Spanish colonisers for whom the cultivated garden was an alien concept. They imported the enclosed, private and intimate patios and larger scale atrios of Southern Spain as a means to incorporate outdoors space for a dwelling on its site, which meant that external boundaries would be read from the outside as constructions housing internal spaces rather than gardens.

The public edges of the Jardines del Pedregal were treated quite differently from the private plot boundaries, often not constructed, but rather implied. The two secondary entrances were formed by highly abstracted and brightly coloured metal gates set between rocky outcrops which obstructed access, cut to allow a path through rather than built up from a lower datum. The generally impassable quality of the rock surface meant that Barragan could use this device extensively.

Boundaries were not man-made obstructions, rather routes allowing access were built into or onto the ground. Indeed Barragan’s primary concern was with the nature of the ground surface itself- the qualities which had made it uninhabitable. Its aridity, unevenness and vast scale were fascinating to him. El Pedregal, on the other hand, had been a site of extraction for centuries. Large mines at its edges had provided material for construction in the surrounding villages of San Angel and Coyoacan, revealing in the process ancient burial sites and the occasional pyramid hidden under the two thousand year old lava flow.

In his gardens Barragan inhabited this ground with lawns flooding the spaces between rocks, or vast expanses of paving contrasted with fountains, steps and pathways that enabled the visitor to explore the intimate spaces of crevice and cave experienced essentially within the huge space of the lava field, viewed against the volcanoes in the distance.

The controlled rectilinearity of his architectural forms and surface texture was quite different from the style of contemporaries working to domesticate other wild American landscapes.

Roberto Burle Marx always juxtaposed the uncertain curves of Brazil’s exuberant nature with perfect ones of his own, whilst to the North architect Richard Neutra and landscape designers Eckbo, Royston and Williams famously used the curve in the desert, at the coast and on the smooth land of suburbia.

The seemingly uncontrolled in Barragan’s carefully manicured spaces was confined to specific alienseeming objects, whether static - figurines, gnarled trees, isolated rocks – or dynamic - a jet of water, a flowing water channel, a pristine gateway.

1950: The entrance courtyard of Luis Barragán’s Casa Prieto López in El Pedregal, Mexico City

Max Cetto and Luis BarragĂĄn: Casa Berdecio, Jardines del Pedregal, MĂŠxico D.F., 1950

A Demonstration Plot Fuentes 140, Jardines del Pedregal, 1948-1951 by Max Cetto & Luis Barragan.

Between 1948 and 1951 two demonstration houses and gardens were constructed in the Avenida Fuentes.

The horticulture at Fuentes 140 was minimal: lawns which met the scoured rocks like carpet, and a deformed palo loco (not a remnant of original flora but reportedly bought by Barragan at a nursery).

Barragan not only chose the vegetation, he also edited the photographs, closely controlling the way that it would be seen. Many of the subsequent houses built by other architects at the Jardines del Pedregal were either surrounded by a wall constructed of volcanic rock, or contained within a hollow, which was the case of Fuentes 140. These boundaries served to bind house and garden closely together, not just physically but spatially too.

The plot of 140 Fuentes was bounded to the north and west by a high smooth rendered wall, whilst the southern and eastern edges were delineated by a steep and craggy lava rampart, upon which the first storey bedroom wing lay like another inhabited wall. The cliff of lava beneath billowed into the eastern wall of the double height living room, then continued out into the garden, its presence prominent through a large window the full height and width of the space. Here another staircase wound its way mysteriously into the lava bed, whilst the lawn transformed into a pool that seemed to flow under the lava cliff. The domains of house and garden were woven into each other through the complex of spaces which belonged to both the outside and inside of the house, namely the patio spaces surrounding the house which consisted of the two entrance patios, and the paved surface partially under the shadow of a high overhang, a section of which was enclosed by walls forming an open air room.

Although the ground levels of the house and garden at El Pedregal were fairly constant in relation to each other, disturbed only by the craggy rocks, and the raised terraces of pond and tempered ground surfaces, the complex system of spatial organisation made deliberate connections between the lower and upper levels, and the different room-like spaces of the house and garden.

Avenida Fuentes 140, seen from the patio and from the garden

I ground floor plan 1 entree I entrance 2 garage 3 dubbelhoge woonruimte I doubleheight living room eetkamer I dining room

In his own ways Barragan approached the problem of how to define post-war Mexican architecture.

Wrenched from the security of an expedient functionalism to which Barragan ì had adhered throughout the thirties in the construction of various private houses, apartment blocks, they found that history, for them, had curtailed the universalist assumptions of modernism. Whilst ‘International Modernism’ was still a viable term for many architects in Mexico and throughout America, another thread was being picked up by those sceptical of the technological advances which had brought so much disruption in Europe. One outcome of this was a turn away from the siteless modernist building-object toward the self-consciously sited house-garden. The intention in this new relationship between site and building was to express the material and symbolic qualities of a particular geographical location in a way which would express a new unified Mexican culture.

The devices used at the Jardines del Pedregal were: the use of indigenous plants, local materials, regional historical precedents, and the transformed relationship between object and site. gardens as an abstract aestheticisation of the land and its spiritual qualities.

Barragan used a self-consciously indigenous planting schema in a clearly selective and visual way, eradicating any sense of chaos to produce a nature closely controlled by man

“elementos arquitectónicos tradicionales decantados, que tienden un puente entre tiempos culturales diversos, subvirtiendo así la linealidad histórica y su consiguiente progreso, implícito en las propuestas de la modernidad del siglo 20”

All architecture, which does not express serenity, failsin its spiritual mission. Thus, it has been a mistake to abandon the shelter of wallsfor the inclemency of large areas of glass.

barragan

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burle marx

aestheticization of the context

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ecological and social hibridity