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PORTO ACADEMY VISITING BARRAGÁN
2019 MEXICO CITY
INDEX
03 04 10 18
Context — Handcraft — Tradition Allen Pierce, Manolo Rubin, Fabian Escalante Eduardo Ugarte, Luis Felipe Velazquez, Juan Manuel Chavez, Manying Chen Karen Cornejo Vilchis, Kinga Rusin, Patricio Manzo Díaz
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CONTEXT — HANDCRAFT — TRADITION
We are imagining how architecture shapes atmospheres by understanding these elements. The idea is to imagine the abstraction of how we place ourselves in the site, using handcraft to build the atmosphere where we will develop our traditions, our lives.
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CONTEXT — HANDCRAFT — TRADITION
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ALLEN PIERCE, MANOLO RUBIN, FABIAN ESCALANTE 0. World
1. Entry
2. Corridor
3. Parlor
4. Porch
5. Patio
6. Garden
It is a spatial sequence, a threshold from the untamed exterior deep into intimate interior and back to exterior, now familiar, domesticated. It is structure-as-mediator, balancing the ordered and the disordered; the known and the nameless; the benign and the menacing; the Edenic and the wild world of the Fall. The sequence is omnipresent in Mexican architectural tradition as passed down from both the Teotihuacano courtyard apartment house and the Spanish mission or monastery. It is carried through the rural hacienda and into the urban home where Barragan regularly employs it with slight variations. It absorbs, in Barragan’s world, the Andalusian paradise garden as its ultimate end, its sanctus sanctorum, beyond the household space of the patio. It is born of its context, a landscape that does not immediately offer clear shelter but provides the raw materials that come, in the Architect’s, the craftsman’s hands, to form house and garden alike. In Tacubaya as on the Pedregal, Barragan forms the volcanic rock underfoot to architectural ground — floors, patios, terraced gardens. The stone is harvested, shaped, stacked into walls, thick and thin, shaping the daylight and the fresh breeze that penetrate the shade of house and porch, building a decay deep into the home’s heart; ordering the garden as path, wall, edge, pool, separating this green from the wild beyond. The sequence connects spaces for rain and for sun, for one and for many.
Site, Structure, Sequence. Lessons from Mexico
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CONTEXT — HANDCRAFT — TRADITION
referential: Mariana Yampolsky and Salas Portugal
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ALLEN PIERCE, MANOLO RUBIN, FABIAN ESCALANTE
referential: Teotihuacan Patio and Tepetate from Tacubaya
It requires a deep sensitivity to mass and material as each takes contrasting forms: Thick and secure against the world; thin and playful, dissolving the separation between the house and garden. It calls for a craft of the hand and the eye to build meaningful but limited connections between each element of the sequence, requiring at times that the architect inhabit the space in order to understand, to frame a juncture, forgoing the drawing in favor of direct observation an action. It requires careful work, sometimes the unbuilding and rebuilding of whole assemblies to shape each space in turn to its activity and the bodies of those who live it. It is a sequence, a program, a site section that is deeply Mexican, and it finds its deepest manifestations in the hands of Luis Barragan as he shapes the homes that dominate his mid-career. Through his unique hands-on process, his sensitivity to the materials and conditions in which he operated and his deep roots in the commingling soils of Mexican and European traditions he successfully recreates, reshapes, possibly perfects a sense of movement-through-building that belongs to the nation, land and people themselves.
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CONTEXT — HANDCRAFT — TRADITION
Yuriria Monastery, Guanajuato -1550.
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ALLEN PIERCE, MANOLO RUBIN, FABIAN ESCALANTE
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CONTEXT — HANDCRAFT — TRADITION
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EDUARDO UGARTE, JUAN MANUEL CHAVEZ, LUIS FELIPE VELAZQUEZ, MANYING CHEN
Immersed in the world of Barragan, we comprehend his gardens as an autogenous context, his religious practices as a tradition of Mexico, and every detail of the shutter doors, operable windows, and Butaque chairs as his insistence on handcraft.
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CONTEXT — HANDCRAFT — TRADITION
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EDUARDO UGARTE, JUAN MANUEL CHAVEZ, LUIS FELIPE VELAZQUEZ, MANYING CHEN
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CONTEXT — HANDCRAFT — TRADITION
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EDUARDO UGARTE, JUAN MANUEL CHAVEZ, LUIS FELIPE VELAZQUEZ, MANYING CHEN Every day of the workshop, we walk along the path. Entering from the white gate of the garden, we pass the wood benches we used to rest on; descending a few steps, we reach the fountain which signifies the middle of the path; turning away our bodies from the concrete platform we have walked on, we step down on a softer ground, with statues under the shadow of the trees; at the end of the path, our studio is hidden right behind a lavish vegetation, due to the fertile soil of the Valley of Mexico. A continuous blue wall appears and disappears for multiple times, connects everything along the path. Since walking along the tranquil path becomes our daily ritual, we start our exercise by interpreting the garden as our context and imaging a different end of the path. A religious space will replace the studio and allow the traditional prayers to happen. The entrance with a low ceiling plays with Barragan’s idea of compression and expansion, while the original terrace is preserved and modified with iconic colors. As people transit from the entrance to the main elevated space, the golden triptych in the shape of across shimmers on the altar, further intensified by an intense beam of light filtered with yellow opaque glass.
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CONTEXT — HANDCRAFT — TRADITION
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EDUARDO UGARTE, JUAN MANUEL CHAVEZ, LUIS FELIPE VELAZQUEZ, MANYING CHEN
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CONTEXT — HANDCRAFT — TRADITION
Local sand
Brick + clay (argila)
Palm tree roof (palapa - local wood)
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KAREN CORNEJO VILCHIS, KINGA RUSIN, PATRICIO MANZO DIAZ
We took as reference the ruins of Barragan’s only project executed in a different physical landscape - on the coast in Majahua, Mexico. We attempted to understand the project and complete it with our own interpretation of Barragan’s language. We analysed his approach to themes such as context, tradition, handcraft to identify how the context of his projects relates to the constructive processes and traditions in his use of spaces.
Context: landscape. Majahua Beach, Colima, Mexico
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CONTEXT — HANDCRAFT — TRADITION
Barragan was very sensitive to use of context as a source of local materials, like tepetate in Casa Ortega, local wood and palm tree roof (palapa) in Majahue. He created his own context by selectively mixing various traditions (moorish patios, pre-hispanic platforms, use of water) with local building systems in order to design the spatial experience. Barragan treated his projects as a lab, making frequent on site changes. His plans are very simple, the experiences get designed on-site by experimenting with the context, tradition and handcraft.
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KAREN CORNEJO VILCHIS, KINGA RUSIN, PATRICIO MANZO DIAZ
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CONTEXT — HANDCRAFT — TRADITION
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KAREN CORNEJO VILCHIS, KINGA RUSIN, PATRICIO MANZO DIAZ
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ALLEN PIERCE EDUARDO DANIEL UGARTE POOT FABIAN MARCELO ESCALANTE HERNANDEZ JUAN MANUEL CHAVEZ KAREN CORNEJO VILCHIS KINGA RUSIN LUIS FELIPE VELAZQUEZ RANGEL MANOLO RUBIN MANUEL CERVANTES MANYING CHEN PATRICIO MANZO DÍAZ RITA FURTADO
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