A Conversation with Luis Barragán

During our anniversary trip to Mexico City, Katie and I toured the house and studio of the architect Luis Barragán. Later that day, I put together this photo essay in an effort to share something of that moving experience.

In the gift shop, after the tour, I mustered up the willpower to bypass the enticing coffee table books and instead picked up A Conversation with Luis Barragán by Alejandro Ramírez Ugarte. It’s a slim book from a small press called Arquitónica, which focuses on architecture and gastronomy in Mexico.

What’s unique about this book is that it captures Barragán’s ideas in his own words. Barragán was an architect who valued privacy and who always seemed overly modest about the originality and thoughtfulness of his work. So he never wrote and rarely spoke about it.

Here, though, we get an extended interview with the editor, as well as the transcript of two short addresses: one to a group of architects in Coronado, California in 1951 and the other an acceptance speech after winning the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1980, which honored him for devoting himself to architecture “as a sublime act of poetic imagination.”

Barragán was alarmed that architects of his day—and those writing about architecture—had all but removed some of his favorite words and values from their collective lexicon: beauty, inspiration, magic, spellbound, enchantment, serenity, silence, intimacy, and amazement. These concepts, he said, “have nestled in my soul” and “have never ceased to be my guiding lights.”

These “guiding lights” were, of course, closely related to Barragán’s Catholic faith, a theme I noted in the photo essay I mentioned earlier. “It is impossible to understand Art and the glory of its history without avowing religious spirituality and the mythical roots that lead us to the very reason of being of the artistic phenomenon,” says Barragán in his Pritzker speech. “Without the desire for God, our planet would be a sorry wasteland of ugliness.”

Thanks be to God for beauty, wherever it is to be found.