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Luis Barragán and the Paradox of a Mexican Modernity

In Raúl Rispa’s Barragán: The Complete Works and Keith Eggener’s writings on Luis Barragán,

the architect’s ouvre is divided into three periods: the Guadalajara houses of the late 1920s, the

Corbusian rationalism of the 1930s, and, after a “retirement” hiatus from 1940 to 1945, his

transition to landscape-oriented and site-integrated work from the Jardines del Pedregal

onward. Eggener convincingly argues that in Barragán’s works at Pedregal, he demonstrates an

attempt to create an architecture both modern—with the connotations of internationalism

that come with it—and uniquely Mexican. This essay will support Eggener’s thesis of Pedregal

as a successful attempt at a “Mexican modernism,” but importantly expand this claim well past

the work at Pedregal and show that its seeds were visible even in Barragán’s oft-neglected

earlier works, and its ideas certainly legible, if transformed, in later ones. Additionally,

discussion of Mexico’s unique position with regard to the potential cultural threats of

modernization will shed light on the stakes behind Barragán’s task. It is through understanding

the history of Mexico’s complex relationship with modernity and internationality that the value

of Barragán’s architecture blossoms.

Barragan’s earliest body of work is perhaps the most neglected in the literature written

on his career, which may explain the fact that critics frequently overlook the evidence it

provides of Barragán’s consistent evolution. The period consists of the “colonial romantic”1

houses Barragán built in Guadalajara and continued up until either his newfound interest in

functionalism around 1930-31, or else until he began working outside of Guadalajara, as he

completed several highly modern houses in the Jalisco capital which occupy a liminal space in

the classification of Barragán’s “periods.” It is important to recognize that these homes do not

entirely predate the architect’s goal of an innately Mexican modernism—they represent

hesitant first steps in the direction of his more defined style and are worth consideration here.

                                                                                                               1 Marc Trieb, foreword to Luis Barragán’s Gardens of El Pedregal, by Keith Eggener. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), ix.

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Barragán was preoccupied with Spanish and Mediterranean revival influence,

Mediteranneanism being a preference of his literary idol Ferdinand Bac,2 and such influence is

clearly legible in the two-storey house at 517 Pedro Loza (figure 1) as well as at 331 Liceo, both

from 1928. Arched windows, unadorned façades, and, in the former, a gable design reminiscent

of the Alamo Mission in San Antonio keeps the influences visibly close at hand. But the Efraín

González Luna House from the same period hints towards Barragán’s coming evolution.

Studying Barragán’s models (figure 2) for the Luna House (and thus seeing past the traditional

materials used to construct the façades), the structure reveals itself as built up of right angles,

cubic components, and “an elaborate, interlocking, multileveled sequence of exterior spaces…”3

The highly geometric design foreshadows the architect’s coming functionalist obsession in its

massing and the play of the different spaces, arranged to encourage an intriguing path through

the site. Equally important is that trees surrounded the building, inside the walled-in property,

and gave the feeling of the house as emerging from the forest of its site (figure 3), albeit to a

much reduced extent than is to come in later works. This site integration would come to

symbolize both a literal tie between a home and its property as well as the greater thematic tie

between an architecture and its native spirit. The house was perhaps not a Corbusian “machine

for living,” but the decorative aspects were predominantly created by access to the surrounding

nature rather than stylized features or materials of the building itself. As such, the Luna House

serves as a nascent pre-image of what was to come much later, though the path to his greatest

works would take him perhaps too deep into the throes of trendy modernist aesthetics before

he would pare it down to a later perfected science.

After his Guadalajara work, Barragán began to explore contemporary European styles. At

the beginning of the 1930s, Barragán took a second trip to Paris where he met Le Corbusier and

                                                                                                               2 Keith Eggener, Luis Barragán’s Gardens of Pedregal (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), 8. 3 Keith Eggener, “Postwar Modernism in Mexico,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 2 (1999): 123, accessed December 3, 2013, http://www.jstor.org/stable/991481.

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likely attended his lectures.4 Le Corbusier’s functionalist modernism clearly left an impression

on Barragán as his works upon his return would begin his “rationalist period.” Expansive white

façades with large rectilinear windows, minimal ornamentation, and entirely flat roofs marked

the houses at the end of Barragán’s time building in Jalisco during the aforementioned liminal

period. Views of Barragán’s Rental House for Robles León (1934, figure 4) could almost pass for

Le Corbusier’s Villa La Roche. These houses were also remarkable for being some of the few

houses proper of this highly modernist period that would come to consist of many larger

apartment buildings—a building plan perhaps more innately modern in its efficiency and even

more toned-down aesthetic. For this work, Barragán moved to Mexico City to begin what he

would call in retrospect, perhaps disparagingly, his “‘commercial’ phase.”5

If the Guadalajara period was marked by frequent reference to foreign influences, the

commercial phase was equally marked by a Corbusian rejection of “style” for modernist

internationalism.6 Ultimately, it would take an awareness of foreign styles, modern functionalist

thought, and the seeking out of a Mexican architectural aesthetic to craft a Mexican

modernism, but the sudden, jarring transition signaled the zeitgeist urge to propel Mexico into

the 20th century and embrace the modern era. If Barragán seemed to lose sight of Mexico in the

energy of the esprit nouveau of the time, for example in his foregoing of local materials for their

more modern, industrial replacements, it had the upside of building a modernist vocabulary for

the architect. This vocabulary would be utilized in future projects which not only captured a

Mexican spirit more than ever, but which could be more audacious ventures, such as Jardines

del Pedregal, thanks to the handsome profits of his commercial period.

But one must also be careful not to write off the commercial period entirely as a phase

which Barragán had to pass through or to disregard its importance in his development, though

                                                                                                               4 Ibid., 131. 5 Raul Ríspa, Barragán: The Complete Works (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), 29, 79. 6 Naturally, the extent to which a modernist “rejection” of style was in fact an embrace of a different style is worth noting here.

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even Barragán himself has done so, remarking that “…it has been an error to replace the

protection of walls with today’s intemperate use of enormous glass windows.”7 Despite this

retrospective disavowal, perhaps the greatest insight we can gleam from Barragán’s rationalist

work is the way it embodies what would become a paradoxical drive to bring Mexico into the

international community (which is to say: the community of the United States and western

Europe). The drive was paradoxical in exactly the sense that any drive towards internationality

is always flirting with a drive away from nationalist pride.

This deadlock is one that seemed to haunt Mexico’s art community for the first half of

the 20th century at the least. Relying too heavily on European influence threatened to render

Mexican art pieces as derivative simulacra (and to draw the scorn of foreign art critics

searching for something uniquely new world), not to mention that it neglected the incredible

wealth of unique national culture. And the International Style of architecture was often seen as

particularly lacking in personality (though some of its proponents may have seen such

statements as compliments). But to embrace too strongly Mexican culture was equally

problematic. Historically, costumbriso art purported to show Mexican “social types” but ended

up more often than not creating a fiction of a neatly and discretely organized society where the

upper class need not worry about the vulgarities of the peasantry, constrained to their novel

little groups depicted for amusement. Similarly, indigenist fetishization always sought to

portray native peoples as “closer to nature” or near-utopian in their societies, when in reality

such idolization always served as a force of essentialization and ignored the horrific conditions

placed upon the marginalized natives. In short, the attempts at an overtly Mexican art seemed

always aimed at the putting a fictional Mexico on display for foreigners or the Mexican elite and

yet seemed to alienate the majority of the Mexican people and fall short of an authentically

nationalist pride. The art being advertised as Mexican was often effectively performative, and

the art that imitated foreign influences left the country’s spirit by the wayside, and so the

                                                                                                               7 Emilio Ambasz, The Architecture of Luis Barragán (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1976), 8.

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problem of a Mexican modernism, if such a thing could exist, was crucial for artists like

Barragán.

It is in this context that works like Rental House for Robles and Barragán’s even more

anonymous apartment buildings of the 1930s suggest an attempt towards bringing modernism

to Mexico, but perhaps fail to bring Mexico into the modernism. Seeing this lack in his work,

Barragán took five years off from 1940 to 1945, even considering quitting architecture.8 If the

commercial period made clear Barragán’s widely shared urge to modernize his home country,

the subsequent period of meditation allowed for reflection on the way in which visible traces of

that same country had been lost in the process. As such, his own commercial works provided a

model of modernism gone too far—he would have to reintroduce Mexico into his architecture

without an entire loss of the notion of Mexico as a modern player in the international

community. It was at this point when Barragán began to experiment with building gardens in

Pedregal, an ancient lava field outside of Mexico City.9

While Eggener makes clear in both his book (Luis Barragan’s Gardens of Pedregal) and

his article (“Postwar Modernism in Mexico”) the ways in which the architecture of Pedregal

demonstrated a Mexican modernism, these ways are worth briefly summarizing here for

comparison against future works as well as providing a discussion of the broader modernist

ideological aspirations of the development. The foremost architectural example of Pedregal’s

Mexican modernism was the way that the houses set out to make the unique and iconic

landscape of Pedregal a part of the lived experience. The 1949 and ’50 “demonstration homes”

(showing off the intended and semi-proscribed designs for Pedregal)10 co-designed with Max

Cetto at 130 and 140 Avenida de las Feuntes (figures 5, 6) sought to maintain as much of the

original landscape not only as a view to be had from the window but an integral component of

the lives of the patrons. Photographs show jagged lava rocks sloping around the clean lines of

                                                                                                               8 Eggener, “Postwar Modernism in Mexico,” 124. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 127.

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the houses, as if to stand in stark counterpoint. The aesthetic of the demonstration houses

ramps of the modernism seen in the Luna House, featuring full-wall glass windows and even

more strict right-angle constructions, but also clearly roots the design, quite literally, in the

land. Cetto and Barragán had no problem with the lava rock coming right up against the façades

of the window—one house was even supposed to have lave rock protruding into the living

room.11 In a sense, the land at times seems to be threatening to overpower the homes,

enveloping them rather than presenting nature as a containable novelty. Rather than houses

with gardens, Pedregal was a community of houses in gardens.

The tension and the balance between land and house were at the core of the ideology of

Pedregal. The fact that each property was walled in should not be misread as an attempt at

restraining or containing the nature within but rather promoting creating cohesion between

the units and providing for each homeowner a layer of separation from the rest of the growing

development. The extensive advertising material, featuring photography by Armando Salas

Portugal, always sells this tension: you can have a modern looking house and you can have a

slice of this “lugar ideal para vivir” all to yourself at the same time (figure 7). Modernity and

Mexican spirit were not irreconcilable desires. Staircases carved out of stone are reflected in

huge panels of glass windows. Untrimmed trees jut out of paved patios. A massive sheet of

volcanic rock gives way to the perfectly parallel lines of the gates.

Eggener argues that “Nothing in Barragán’s ouvre after El Pedregal…would so powerfully

express the integration of building with the site…none of these [subsequent] locations

possessed the Pedregal’s inherent, natural drama.”12 What this assertion misses is the fact that,

to the extent that Pedregal’s “drama” really was so unique, Barragán found ways to compensate

for a less dramatic site by creating bold statements with his architecture. Rather than resort to

the likely success of riding on his laurels and building semi-Corbusian marvels erupting out of

                                                                                                               11 Ibid., 130. 12 Ibid., 140.

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volcanic grounds forever, Barragán pushed the envelope further and sought new methods of

building his Mexican modernism.

The Towers of Satellite City (or Torres de Satélite, 1957, figure 8), built in cooperation

with Mathias Goeritz and Jesús Reyes, are an exemplar of Barragán’s evolution beyond the

“site-integrated functionalism” model of Mexican modernism. Ambasz describes the project,

five prismatic towers in different colors seated along the highway towards the Naucalpan

Ciudad Satélite, as somewhat simultaneously and separately conceived between Goeritz and

Barragán.13 This notion does not fit with every historical account but is not unthinkable either,

both Goeritz and Barragán would show great interest in the notion of Emotional Architecture

(see Goeritz’s Manifiesto de la Arquitectura Emocional and the closing quote by Barragán in

this text), which was at the heart of the Towers. The towers were designed as a dynamic

experience: their arrangement causes shorter towers to appear taller at first, only for their size

relationships to shift as the “highway sculpture” was experienced by the cars speeding by, the

primary way to view the towers.14 And the towers shift in more than just scale as one gets

closer—the sleek appearance reveals a more defined brick masonry as one draws nearer as if to

suggest that their the refinement of modernist aesthetic is always a façade for a more rugged

layer beneath. This play between rugged stone and sleek geometry is an obvious mirror to the

same relationship between the rocks and the buildings in Pedregal, accomplished even without

the unique geography of the lava fields.

Like Pedregal, the Towers are rich in further ideological depth. The site is equally, but

differently, profound: the Towers being seated between sides of a highway gives it the

aforementioned audience of drivers, a public art like a new form of muralism, seeking out an

increasingly modern audience. Further, just as Pedregal offered an ideal of the utility of

functionalism within the beauty of Mexican nature, Ciudad Satélite offered its own uniquely

                                                                                                               13 Ambasz, The Architecture of Luis Barragán, 55. 14 Mathias Goeritz, “Highway Sculpture: The Towers of Satellite City,” Leonardo 3, no. 3 (1970): 321, accessed March 7th, 2013, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1572338.  

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Mexican modern future: a space for an auto-commuting middle class, a growing populace

signaling Mexico’s industrial development and social growth. The Towers are a bold

announcement of Mexico’s future which is sprawled into satellite cities and suburbs, riding in

cars at high speeds on the highway, and not yielding to anonymous international sterility

thanks to bold colors and textural masonry.

Even into the 1960s, as Mexico’s place in the sphere of the political and cultural

“modern world” grew ever certain, Barragán continued building for a uniquely Mexican modern

future. One of the most strikingly successful projects towards the end of his career was Los

Clubes (figures 9, 10), a residential community designed for equestrians (and their horses). Built

primarily in 1963 and ’64, with additions later in the decade, black and white photographs of Los

Clubes could be mistaken for a reversion to Corbusian worship, but in reality the complex was

rendered in pink and purple stucco walls and structures, many of which serve not to enclose the

spaces from the outdoors but simply organize the space in a logical and meaningful way. Water

pours wildly out from the squared surfaces of the structures creating fountains and wading

areas for the horses. Nearly every wall seems to have massive pieces cut out for the viewing of

other spaces of the facility, and the natural beauty of the surroundings.

Los Clubes may not appear to be as integrated into its site as Pedregal, but comprised of

so many open-air spaces with only partial walls and wide-open expanses, the feeling is always

made of the Clubes fountains and stables as being small pieces (even sculptures, like the

Towers) that exist outside in nature , as a part of nature, rather than man-made structures

imposed upon the land. The beautiful, bright colors and the texture of the stuccoed walls blunt

the potential impact of the hard geometric design, and the open air explains why: what built

space could possibly top the natural one already there? The fact that the space is for equestrian

enthusiasts and their horses to share strengthens the notion of a bond with what is natural and

an openness towards the inherent beauty of the Mexican landscape. Nature does not need to

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be dominated or contained; nature is not an obstacle to modernity or utility but a boon to the

growth of the spiritual link between nation and its populace.

Luis Barragán was an architect who took it upon himself not to build with not just brick,

stucco, glass, and steel, but with the geographic and cultural landscape of Mexico itself. The

subtle geometry and the garden utilization of his Guadalajara pieces comes full circle in the

beautifully rendered pink stucco walls of Los Clubes. And even the commercial International

Style apartments signal Barragán’s consciousness of Mexico’s collective urge to seize the

advances of modern stylings and techniques—architectural, cultural, social, and so on—and

would show him the danger of losing Mexico in the process. There was not a building in

Barragán’s body of work that did not contribute to the development of a dynamic approach to

synthesizing the efficiency and revolution of the future with the enduring spirit of Mexico itself.

As such, with an integrated view of his entire career, Barragán’s role is cemented as a force of

Mexico’s continuing evolution.

“I believe in an ‘emotional architecture.’ It is very important for

human kind that architecture should move by its beauty; if there

are many equally valid technical solutions to a problem, the one

which offers the user a message of beauty and emotion, that one

is architecture.”

—Luis Barragán15

                                                                                                               15 Ambasz, The Architecture of Luis Barragán, 8.

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Annotated Bibliography

Ambasz, Emilio. The Architecture of Luis Barragán. New York: The Museum of Modern Art,

1976.

Ambasz’s text was one of the first written on Barragán and contains a selection of large,

beautiful photographs as well as informative texts accompanying each piece. While the

descriptions were not as informative regarding Barragán’s theories and ideologies, they

provided important background and contextual information.

Eggener, Keith. “Postwar Modernism in Mexico: Luis Barragán’s Jardines del Pedregal and the

International Discourse on Architecture and Place.” Journal of the Society of

Architectural Historians 58, no. 2 (1999): 122-124. Accessed December 3, 2013.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/991481.

Both of Eggener’s texts provide key starting points as well as points of departure for this

essay. What Eggener sees in Pedregal, I see in nearly every one of Barragán’s pieces,

starting small, but growing and changing throughout his evolution. His writings were

indispensible and do an incredible job at picking up the vocabulary of Mexican

modernist vocabulary in the houses at Pedregal.

Eggener, Keith. Luis Barragán’s Gardens of El Pedregal. New York: Princeton Architectural Press,

2001.

Goeritz, Mathias. “Highway Sculpture: The Towers of Satellite City.” Leonardo 3, no. 3 (1970):

319-233. Accessed March 7, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1572338.

Goeritz’s own text on his sculptures help to understand the ideas behind the sculpture.

He claims the majority of the credit for their ideas, but this appears to be a contentious

issue throughout the various texts.

Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture . Translated by Frederick Etchells. New York: Dover

Publications, 1986.

Le Corbusier’s text was likely indispensible to Barragán himself and so provided here a

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look at Barragán’s own ideological inspirations. One can see what he was compelled

towards and later moving away from in his career.

Oles, James. Art and Architecture in Mexico. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2013.

Oles’ book features several quality photographs as well as a small but helpful insight into

both the Pedregal model houses and the Towers of Satellite City.

Pelletier, Louise. “Modeling the Void: Mathias Goeritz and the Architecture of Emotions.”

Journal of Architectural Education 62, no. 2 (2008): 6-13. Accessed December 3, 2013.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40480828.

This text primarily discusses Goeritz’s work on El Eco but did help in understanding

where Goeritz’s and Barragán’s notions on emotion in architecture and design

converged.

Rispa, Raúl, Alvaro Siza, Antonio Toca Fernández, José María Buendía Júlbez, Luis Barragán

Morfin, and Antonio Fernández Alba. Barragán: The Complete Works. 2nd ed. New York,

N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003.

Rispa’s book not only contains an incredibly wealth of images but also multiple

informative, if opinionated, introductory texts and explanatory notes. The Complete

Works was consulted for logistical and background information on nearly every piece in

this essay.

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Figures

Figure 1: Luis Barragán, 517 Pedro Loza, 1928. Photograph, Fundación de Arquitectura Tapatía (Jalisco Architecture

Foundation). Scanned from: Luis Barragán, The Complete Works, by Raúl Rispa. New York: Princeton Architectural

Press, 2003: pg. 54.

Figure 2: Luis Barragán, Model of Efraín González Luna House, c. 1928. Photograph, Spanish Ministry of Public

Works. Scanned from: ibid.: pg. 53.

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Figure 3: Luis Barragán, Efraín González Luna House, 1928. Photograph by M. Yampolsky. Scanned from: ibid.: pg.

48.

Figure 4: Luis Barragán, Rental House for Robles León, 1934. Photograph, Aurofoto/MOPTMA. Scanned from: ibid.:

pg. 76.

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 Figure 5: Luis Barragán and Max Cetto, Casa Berdecio “Demonstration House” (140 Avenida de las Fuentes),

Jardines del Pedregal, 1949. Photograph by Roberto E. Luna, 1957, Archivo Max Cetto, UAM Azcapotzalco, Mexico

City. Scanned from: Art and Architecture in Mexico, by James Oles. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2013: pg. 318.

Figure 6: Luis Barragán and Max Cetto, Casa Berdecio “Demonstration House” (140 Avenida de las Fuentes),

Jardines del Pedregal, 1949. Photograph by Guillermo Zamora, 1952, originally published in Mexico’s Modern

Architecture. New York: Architectural Book Pub. Co., 1952. Scanned from: Luis Barragán’s Gardens of Pedregal, by

Keith Eggener. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001: pg. 54.

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 Figure 7: Luis Barragán and Max Cetto, Gardens of El Pedregal, 1945-50s. Photograph by Armando Salas Portugal,

from advertisement originally published in Arquitectura Mexico, December 1954. Scanned from: ibid.: 73.

Figure 8: Mathias Goeritz and Luis Barragán, Towers of Satellite City, 1957-58. Photograph, Protoplasma

Kid/Wikimedia commons. Scanned from Art and Architecture in Mexico, by Oles: pg. 327.

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 Figure 9: Luis Barragán, Los Clubes Lovers Fountain, 1964. Photograph by Armando Salas Portugal. Scanned from:

Luis Barragán: The Complete Works, by Rispa: pg. 180.

Figure 10: Luis Barragán, San Cristobal stable, horse pool, swimming pool and house for Mr. and Mrs. Folke

Egerstrom, subdivision of Los Clubes, 1967-68. Photograph by Carla de Beneditti, Milan. Scanned from Luis

Barragán’s Gardens of Pedregal, by Eggener: pg. 93.