House museums #28: Casa Luis Barragán

Luis Barragán’s house is a paradox: simultaneously warm and cool, minimalist but filled with life, domestic yet almost numinous with its sense of repose and its religious iconography. It is also one of the most unforgettable and influential houses in modern architecture.

Barragán was born in Guadalajara in 1902. He trained as an engineer, picking up architecture as he went along but with no formal training. His early houses mixed Modernist ideas with colonial frills but by the time he moved to Mexico City in 1936, he had shed the fussy details in favour of a pared-down but still sensual style.

His remarkable Cuadra San Cristóbal, an equestrian estate in Los Clubes (1966-68), a composition of cool turquoise pool and sculptural walls in hot pinks and mauves, continues to surprise. The five triangular prisms of his haunting skyline sculpture, the Torres de Satélite (1958), designed with Mathias Goeritz, is perhaps Mexico City’s best-known public artwork.

When Barragán came to build his own house in 1947 it was not, as might be expected of a Modernist villa, in the city’s suburbs but embedded in the working-class neighbourhood of Tacubaya. Just a little larger than its neighbours and featuring one big, enigmatic projecting window, it has an otherwise anonymous appearance, its dirty plaster fading into the shabby streetscape.

Inside, simple lines, bold colours and a subtle poetry dominate. A small entrance lobby, its walls bathed in yellow light from a tinted window, reveals only a glimpse of salmon pink, the tone of an expensive polo shirt, at the top of a staircase. The vestibule, with its volcanic stone floor, leads to the living room, simply yet comfortably furnished, with screens dividing expansive entertaining spaces from the more personal areas.

In Barragán’s small, austere dining room, a modest crucifix adorns one wall. A low serving table in front of it means the server must bow before Christ to pick up the tray, while the cross imparts a blessing as they pass through the door.

Barragán was an observant Catholic and the house is studded with Christian imagery; a gilded angel, Gothic sculptures and implied crosses — such as that formed by the mullion and transom of the main dining room window framing the lush courtyard garden.

Barragán’s much-imitated cantilevered — or floating — stair climbs ghostly, seemingly gravity-defying up the white wall of his studio. It is a piece of unmissable architectural sculpture, a little precarious, a little surreal.

The bedroom is so sparse it resembles a priest’s quarters with its mean-looking single bed, pristine white sheets, crucifix and medieval church statues atop an altar-like side table. Barragán never married and, although he remained closeted, it is thought he was gay.

The most beautiful space is the roof terrace, its surfaces painted in vivid burnt orange and fuchsia pink, with the sky as its ceiling. There are hints in its dreamlike, stage-set nature of adobe villages and of the strange cityscapes painted by Metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico, whom the architect admired.

Barragán used to sit up here, often just on the sun-warmed surface of the roof, his back to the wall. “My house is my refuge,” he wrote, “an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience.”

casaluisbarragan.org

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