Fuente de los Amantes in Mexico

Last week, we spoke about Philip Johnson of the US, who won the first Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1979. This week, we shall discuss the architect who bagged the honour the next year, Luis Barragan of Mexico.

Born in 1902 in Guadalajara, Mexico, Barragan was an engineering graduate who taught himself architecture after he travelled to France and Spain in 1931 and attended lectures by Le Corbusier.

He moved to Mexico City in 1936 and remained there till he died in 1988.

He was one of the early minimalist architects even though his works clearly reflect the influence of his travels in the Mediterranean and North Africa. The use of colours, textures, pure planes with walls of stucco, adobe (dried mud) timber or water show a closeness with nature. He preferred to call himself a landscape architect.

Barragan’s works not only influence three generations of Mexican architects and many more throughout the world. The Pritzker jury of 1980 commented: “We are honouring Luis Barragan 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.”

Barragan’s works show simple, minimalist architecture can be as striking as any other style when treated with sensitivity. His own house in Tacubaya, Mexico City, is a composition of bold forms in bright colours which, somehow, does not seem to contradict the surrounding landscape.

The chapel for the Capuchinas sacrament arias del Purisimo Corazon de Maria at Tlalpan, Mexico, uses the harsh Mexican sunlight through brightly coloured punctured screens which bathes the interior in diffused soothing light.

His other major works include the Cuadva San Cristobal Club the Torres Satellite, Las Arboledas, Fuente de los Amantes, Gilardi House, all of them in Mexico.

His superb control over scale is demonstrated in the Gateway to Mexico City project. The brightly coloured concrete towers seem like 20-storey buildings as the motorists climb the top of the steep contour before coming down the slope into the city.

The three-to-four-storey height of the towers reveals itself as one passes the towers and enters Mexico City. Barragan always stressed on the visual aspects of architecture. To him, architects were not designers unless they learned how to see and visualise the impact of built environment on the un-built.

In his acceptance speech, Barragan quoted a Mexican poet to explain the philosophy behind his design concept:

“Through sight the good and the bad,

We do perceive unseeing eyes

Souls deprived of hope.”

Partha Ranjan Das (The author is an architect and urban designer)