Carson Michaelis
E131 // W02 → On Barragan
Fall 2024
Elective Course - Mexican Architecture and Urbanism: From Pre-Columbian to Contemporary
University of Texas at Austin
Professor Juan Miró
Following a semester of study and presentation, we were asked to focus on a particular topic within Mexican architecture and to write about it. The following is my final paper.
Through the Critical, Regional, Looking Glass: A Look at the Interpretation of The Work of Louis Barragan
1. Introduction
My interest in the following topic began two years ago when I was studying in Switzerland. A professor had asked me what styles of architecture I enjoyed, since for the final of her course I was writing a theory paper on the work of Marlon Blackwell. I responded about how my interests varied, but regional architectures similar to that of Sam Mockbee, Brian MacKay Lyons, and Rick Joy were what I enjoyed the most. This eventually led us to some extended discussion about the role of Kenneth Frampton’s idea of ‘Critical Regionalism’ and what it meant. Our conversation let off with the recommendation that I read an article titled “Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism”, by Keith Eggener, - now a professor at the University of Oregon, who was at the University of Missouri-Columbia at the time it was written. His article focused on Barragan as an icon of this prevalent idea of ‘Critical Regionalism’ within architecture, and pushed back against a particular interpretation of his work - stating that his ideas were influenced far less by the Mexican concepts of space we often associate with him, and using it as an example of a flawed way of viewing architecture. Of course this piqued my interest - and since then I have been curious as to how these differing opinions arose and what they say about the interpretation of architecture.
I would like to use this paper as an opportunity to explore more about the different ways in which the work of Barragan’s has been interpreted over time. It is less about exploring the term ‘Critical Regionalism’ in all its facets and more about using Barragan as a case study in revealing how and what we know about certain architects and buildings. I believe different opinions on Barragan’s work provides an interesting study into both the frameworks of colonial and post-colonial architectural analysis, which also create a tension as he spans between European and Mexican ideas - in the manner of a true mestizaje architecture. It is also important to me that we do closer looking at the way in which many of the architects that we reveres work is presented to us, and which the documentary The Proposal (which we have already watched in class) has made it clear that access to large collections of works can easily become privatized, leaving many holes to be filled in the telling of stories and letting the analyst begin to take authority of their own over others’ interpretations. This small work of historiography can also serve for myself, who is about to enter the world of the working architect, as a reminder that the stories we read and tell are never pure facts, but works of interpretation.
2. Critical Regionalism
For this, we start two decades before the work of Eggener’s, and instead look to a work of the famed architectural historian Kenneth Frampton, who in 1983 penned an essay for The Anti-Aesthetic titled “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”. Sandwiched between complementary essays by such heavyweights as Jurgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard, and Edward Said, Frampton pleads for architects to mediate between their local contexts and the time’s prevalent internationalist style. This form of dialectical design, he argues, may begin to form a resistance to the perceived placelessness and homogenization which was brought on by global capital and the modern style. Among his main points are a desire for architects to favor the design process over any particular visual style, to refrain from romantic stylistic nostalgia, and to defamiliarize viewers in an attempt to help them better engage with their surroundings (which is quite fitting, as the essay is printed right next to one of Habermas’ after all).
As one can imagine, the work of Louis Barragan, who had arisen from seemingly nowhere to the towering heights of a solo exhibition in the MoMA (only seven years prior), seemed to fit into this category nearly perfectly. After all, he was born in Mexico, visited and studied in Europe, and had returned to create an architecture not immediately identifiable as internationalist - all was in fact quite Mexican feeling by the standards of architectural historians. Even more, the preface to his MoMA show said the same thing in it’s preface, in which the author, and fellow Latin American architect Emilio Ambasz states “While his design approach is classical and atemporal, the elements of his architecture are deeply rooted in his country’s cultural and religious traditions, It is through the haunting beauty of his hieratic constructions that we have come to conceive of the passions of Mexico’s architecture.” (Ambasz, 5). Frampton certainly thought the same, and when he followed his already-important “Six Points…” essay with another in Yale’s Perspecta later in 1983 titled “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism”, whose work should he include on the first page? Barragan’s, of course.
The rest of this mention, in which Frampton looks closer at Barragan’s life and work (for nearly one and a half whole pages) is important for us, as it represents what an analysis of his work at the time could tell a historian. Frampton singled him out for his houses’ unity with their landscapes, saying they were indeed “Nothing if not topographic” (Frampton, Prospects, 152). He stated that their evident modern influence was complimented by their integration into landscapes, be they harsh or lush, all were said to be uniquely Mexican. ‘They are earthbound’, he wrote, after which he assigns to them a mystique, a cloudy origin with mythical beginnings from which they rise. He continues to recount to us facts of Louis’ life, including his youth upon ranches in the Mexican countryside, an interest in both Islamic and abstract architecture, and later collaborations with Mathias Goeritz.
In total, Frampton explains to us that Barragan is but only one of many who operate in this fashion, but should be singled out as a supreme example of the idea that architects of the second half of the Twentieth Century were beginning to turn away from a strict internationalist style and further towards that dialectic process of design. Barragan represented an idea that this was not something Frampton was making up out of thin air and had only written in theory, but was something which was happening already, which was even growing. In this way any praise already given to Barragan could also be directed to Frampton in kind as a sort of praise for the new idea of an architectural ‘Critical Regionalism’. Along with others, Barragan’s existing work served to elevate Frampton’s idea to one of massive architectural importance by themiddle of the 1980’s.
3. Barragan’s Own History
If we are to talk about the ways in which Barragan has been seen through time, it is critically important to mention the story he arrived with when he was introduced to the architectural canon. As with all art, the story of the artist is to many who view or experience the work just as important as the product of that story, or at least certain parts of it.
From our class lecture on Barragan’s life and work we can recount the basics. Louis was born in 1902 to a wealthy family in Guadalajara, and spent his early years running around the ranches that his family owned. Here he was surrounded by many courtyards and walls of those Mexican Haciendas. This form of land ownership was unique to Mexico, and contained equally unique formal elements, such as the inner courtyard layout, the zaguan, and orientation inward rather than out to the landscape. That orientation inward came from the use of plain, solid walls facing outward, and arcaded spaces on the interior. This use of walls for enclosure was extremely important to Barragan, as they were more than just a symbol of Mexican architecture to him, but a spatial element which provided both comfort and safety.
There isn’t a massive amount of recorded history on Barragan’s early life, and what simple facts there are often take a back seat to the words of the man himself. He acted as an author in his own legacy, and it was not only left up to those who would come along later and promote or critique his work. For example, in the article written by Frampton in which he includes the work of Barragan, he takes care to paste in a blocked quote of Barragan’s recounting a story of his youth. It ended in a flourishing “No, there are no photographs. I have only its memory.” Through the recounting of unrecorded sentimental and fleeting feelings, Barragan is able to extend further the ideas of a romantic Mexican architecture, and promote a mysterious history of his own. While in reality he was one of any number of thousands of Mexican children born to the aristocracy at the time and who experienced comparable childhood conditions, he is able to layer a sort of mystique over this reality, keeping it far from prying eyes. The memories that he made are sometimes not there for us to check, and the history is gone, but we feel as if an analysis of his work will reveal them to us, and in it we may find some part of Mexico that long went missing.
The story begins to get more real later on, as Barragan gets into his college years. He continued his schooling, and graduated from “Escuela Libre de Ingenieros” in Guadalajara, near his home. He was a good student and studied Civil Engineering. As a gift from his wealthy family, he took a trip to Europe in 1923 after his graduation to visit works of architecture that he enjoyed and had studied in and out of school. While abroad, he also became in touch with the European Intellectual scene, which is evident through his repeated citations of European writers after having returned, especially Ferdinand Bac. After his return he began to work as a developer, and sometimes as an architectural designer. Interestingly, The Pritzker Architecture Prize website says of Barragan this time that “In the late 1920s, he was associated with a movement known as the Escuela Tapatía or Guadalajara School, which espoused a theory of architecture dedicated to the vigorous adherence to regional traditions. His architectural practice was based in Guadalajara from 1927 until 1936 when he moved to Mexico City and remained until his death. His work has been called minimalist, but it is nonetheless sumptuous in color and texture. Pure planes, be they walls of stucco, adobe, timber, or even water, are his compositional elements, all interacting with Nature.”
After his second trip to Europe - in 1931 - in which he met Le Corbusier, he returned with a passion which never seemed to die. While he was a driven man, he was never hurried, and as such has left us with fewer works than many other famous architects. Because of his financial status, he did not need to design for others to afford to live, and as such was picky about who he designed for. A good example of what some of his early work looked like is the 1929 Cristo House. Designed and built as a home for the head of the Guadalajara city council, it is exemplary of what the Pritzker website calls that ‘Escuela Tapatia’ Style. The home is a simplified form of typical constructions at the time, boasting high textured plaster walls, geometrically patterned parapets and Spanish tile roofs. Already though, some of the ideas of Barragan’s which would later become famous found their way into smaller portions of the building. Three small semicircular windows on the roof terrace provide relief from the flat wall, but with a kind of geometric rigidity of a modern architect, included too are many stairs which also seem to float. He designed many other works like this in Guadalajara and even more still after he moved to Mexico City in 1935. It was not until he designed a house for himself in 1940 until he truly claimed a style of his own.
In the years in between (1935-1940), Barragan fully embraced the idea that he could bring the international style to Mexico City. Having met Le Corbusier he seemed eager to put some of his ideas into implementation, which happened through a series of projects, one of the largest being an apartment building for Jose Mojica, built between 1937 and 1940 in Mexico City. Of the many, many buildings he designed or consulted on in these five or so years of using the internationalist style, the best documented project are the Houses in Avenida Parque Mexico. The two near-symmetrical units were designed with all the bells and whistles of the European Internationalist style at the time. The small railings over the upper story windows reflect the era’s popular gridded mullions, the concrete smoothed and painted white, the corner of the building turned inverted porch, and it would fit right in as one of many in a catalogue of the style. Even in regards to the floor plan and ideas about how to organize space, Barragan was thinking like a European at this time and seemingly not much like a Mexican. The efficiency of spaces and reduction in floor area of circulation seemed to be of paramount importance. Regardless, the project was a hit. It featured by the name of ‘Two-Family House’ in the April 1937 issue of the Architectural Record, and its publication was followed up in the August and September 1937 editions of Arquitectura y Decoracion. By this time Barragan can certainly be said to have already had a foothold in both the ‘Western’ and Mexican design worlds.
That old edition of the Architectural Record is also able to provide us with better insight into the way that Barragan’s work was being covered before his rise to superstar(-chitect)dom. The title of the edition is “The New Architecture in Mexico”, and takes a look at the different new constructions - meant to surprise the average North American reader, who because of their biases would likely not otherwise even think about Mexico as being a country producing any international architectural value. Not only were the Avenida Park Houses covered in this special edition of the Record, but so was a small Pavilion he designed in Guadalajara’s ‘The Park of the Revolution’. A small quote from the two paragraphs covering this project is worth a quick read. “A delightful note of caprice and fun in contrast to the simple architecture has been contributed by the architect’s clever use of color throughout the buildings. Luis Barragan, of all the younger group, has been most successful in his imaginative use of color in modern architecture. His naturally sensitive aesthetic perceptions have never found satisfaction in restriction to the palette popularly associated with the ‘international style’.” (40) Here it seems that Barragan is already, in 1937 - 30 years before his show at the MoMA, showing an intention to separate himself from the pack. Also covered are the Speculation House, which is the most internationalist feeling of the lot.
What can this tell us about Barragan though? I would say that it shows us that he was destined for this kind of attention from the architectural world from the beginning, for one. Not only were three of his projects shown in the pages next to the likes of O’Gorman and Vilagran, but even a work of his father’s was displayed as an example of superior Mexican architecture. He had the name recognition already, and that’s not something that is easy to give up - even if you do decide to live your life like a monk while also remaining extremely selective about the architectural projects you take on.
After this foray into the world of total internationalist architecture is when Barragan begins to really find himself. It was in 1940, as mentioned before, when he built his own home, that he began to carve out a space for himself. Here he introduced many ideas for which he would later win the Pritzker. His unmanicured gardens - be they existing in the landscape or planted on the inside of the courtyards he loved so much, the affinity for monastic life encapsulated in the stark and seemingly overbearing plain vertical walls, or the feeling of seclusion and isolation and its emphasis over views. These ideas are what we know Barragan so well for, and are each worth essays in their own right, and for which many have already been written. It is perhaps best encapsulated by the Pritzker Prize jury citation, written in 1980. “We are honoring Luis Barragán for his commitment to architecture as a sublime act of the poetic imagination. He has created gardens, plazas, and fountains of haunting beauty—metaphysical landscapes for meditation and companionship. A stoical acceptance of solitude as man’s fate permeates Barragán’s work. His solitude is cosmic, with Mexico as the temporal abode he lovingly accepts. It is to the greater glory of this earthly house that he has created gardens where man can make peace with himself, and a chapel where his passions and desire may be forgiven and his faith proclaimed. The garden is the myth of the Beginning and the chapel that of the End. For Barragán, architecture is the form man gives to his life between both extremes.” For all of this, and now that we know his story, it is time to return to where we began - with that article by Keith Eggener.
4. A Critique of Interpretation
Eggener uses ‘Placing Resistance’ to posit that with the beautiful work Barragan has done, the way that the conversations around it have been framed are entirely problematic. He points especially to his later works (in reference to those completed after Barragan’s own home) which were hailed as ‘Critically Regionalist’ pieces of architecture. To introduce us to this concept he reaches back for a quote from Jane Jacobs, and orients it towards Frampton’s idea of a critical regionalism. “Just as postcolonialist tendencies have always been produced by colonialism, so colonialist tendencies necessarily inhabit often optimistically designated postcolonial formations.” In this way he identifies quickly and effectively that Barragan’s work has effectively been appropriated, in a way which parallels the quote by Jacobs. He states that in order to fit Barragan’s work into a critically regionalist paradigm, large portions of the architecture’s primary character have been neglected. While Eggener goes on to orient the content of the essay further towards generalizing this idea as a widespread issue in architectural criticism, it is of my interest in this paper to build upon what he is saying in regards to Barragan.
Later on, a point is raised that if critical regionalism is to represent both an architecture of resistance against the universal, and also to favor a particular process over any style, why is it that in many areas only one architect’s designs were favored as being representative over all others? Used as examples are Tadao Ando, Oscar Neimeyer, Charles Correa, and Louis Barragan. In effect, this ‘placeless’ logic created what seemed to be a single correct regional style, and even worse, it was a style more often than not imposed from an outside region. (230).
From here we begin to focus solely on Barragan. By the 1970’s his work had been more-or-less forgotten, having ridden those highs in the late 1930’s he was no longer the recipient of attention outside the industry, and with few commissions was even being forgotten within it. While other architects, such as Ramirez Vasquez and Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon were all building large public and social buildings for a ‘new’ Mexico, Barragan remained inside his elite and private world. Despite his sinking into the background of the modern architecture movement in Mexico, life changed for all after the 1976 exhibition of Barragan’s work at the MoMA rewrote the narrative completely. Now for those who were ‘in the know’ about architecture, to be a Mexican architect was less about integration with the public, social good, and monumentality - as one could argue it had been since and even before Diego Rivera. Things instead were now about enclosure, the private life, and a sort of serenity reflective of how a rich elite might desire to live.
Elsewhere Eggener brings up yet another astute point. What did Barragan think of his own work? Sure, he did very little speaking, and especially in analysis, yet we can still gain a closer idea as to what he was thinking through his actions in the process of design. Firstly, it is important to note that Barragan called his own work ‘autobiographical’, and stated that ‘the architect must listen and heed his nostalgic revelations’. These all worked as noted earlier to coat his works in a sense of mystery and lore, and to lend both the viewer and critic towards a more sentimental interpretation of his works. In his actions though we can see his intentions even further, especially through the process of the development of El Pedregal. He spent countless hours marketing the project to an international audience before it was even begun, and in this way we can see that he was indeed building far more for an international audience a kind of architecture which I believe perhaps was intended to feel Mexican more than it ever was Mexican.
The most important actions as an architect though would certainly have to be his turning his back upon the social change that was happening in Mexico at the time and the fact that he was uninterested in participating in it from a personal or design standpoint. He spent his days instead of designing public works or even private redevelopments for a recovering country following centuries of devastating wars and revolutions, instead looked inward towards some of the most extravagant, private, and elite projects that one could even find in the country at the time. It is for this that we should too remember Barragan, not forgetting that he was also aggressively speculating in real-estate at the time, furthering the divide between the people and aristocracy that it seemed so many other Mexican architects were working to destroy. I will leave this section off with a quote from the end of the Barragan section of Eggener’s article: “His elegant walled compounds, elite subdivisions, and equestrian enclaves may, as Frampton suggested, mark a kind of critique, but it is worth keeping in mind just what sort of critique this was: hardly radical or progressive, but romantic and reactionary.”
5. Conclusion
It would benefit us now to ask: why does this historiographic look at the work of Barragan even matter? What implications does it have for the interpretation of Mexican architecture anyways?
These questions can begin to be answered by looking at the work of what many consider to be the most similar ‘disciple’ of the many ideas of Barragan: Ricardo Legorreta. He began his own office in 1963, after having spent his decade prior working with Jose Villagran Garcia. While they didn’t work together on any built projects, the two became good friends and designed together for a few unrealized works. It was from here that Legorreta became far more reflective of the kind of work that a follower of Barragan might produce. He began to play far more with colored plains, simple platonic geometries with little ornament, and placed an emphasis on strong lights and shadows.
Through the same boosters that supported Barragan came massive support for this turn in style from Legorreta, and for decades he was perhaps the most well known Mexican architect outside of Mexico. To bolster that reputation he even began to expand into America and elsewhere for some of his projects. I have had the pleasure of visiting a project of his as far north as Chicago, Illinois and can say that the experience inextricably tied to mexico by theorists does travel well, and something about the steam rising from outdoor floor vents does something to harken back to a stereotypical idea of the Mexican lowlands’ summer heat.
All of this is to say that the understanding of the importance of Barragan matters because it is still directly relevant today, not just in the way that we as architects, students, critics, and educators look at the work of his, but because it effects the day-to-day life of unrelated students at the University of Chicago. It is because of this that when I walk outside of the building with my friend who has no architecture background other than knowing me for 7 years, he is able to identify it as feeling ‘Mexican, or South American, or just something definitely not from around here’. I think now about what it would mean to look back and to think on what may have been if instead a different idea of ‘Mexican’ architecture had caught on and carried. Would we instead be seeing more integracion plastica around the world, in a more meaningful sense than just coloring a plain wall? What if it became Mexican to think about social issues in the working firm of an architect, in the way that Tatiana Bilbao is doing now? I can only imagine if for a generation already there had been series’ of practitioners who were just as dedicated to providing for their communities instead of fetishising an architecture of privacy and contemplation at the expense of seemingly any public good.
All of this is to say that I appreciate the work of both Barragan and Legoretta, and adore the vast majority of work happening in Mexico at the moment, but I think that we have to work, especially as students and educators, to push for an understanding of architectural works that supports the idea that maybe everything that wins an award or is exhibited at the MoMA isn’t entirely inherently good. The article of Eggener’s isn’t perfect either, as he takes his own appropriation of Barragan’s work just as Frampton had, but it is important that we try to approach many of these issues from multiple angles so that we can all find informed opinions of our own somewhere in between.
For now though, Barragan’s name remains such as the name of the rose. While some look upon it like Shakespeare’s Juliet - as for them any other name would smell just as sweet, I tend to think of it a bit differently. Like Umberto Eco recounts of the rose, perhaps the work simply represents a deeper beauty, and from it we have abstracted the visually divine. Regardless, for us all, the beauty is there, and long shall it remain.