As a teenager I already knew it would be important to expand my horizons and, in turn, the way that I saw the world. As a student studying horticulture, it was my ambition to see the über-meadows of the Valley of Flowers in Northern India. It was an adventure to travel into the Himalaya and the valley was unlike anything I had ever experienced in terms of magnitude. Whilst standing in the midst of cypripedium orchids, persicaria and potentilla that lapped the mountains soaring above me into the clouds, I had an epiphany. That I wanted to garden with the freedom of these wild plant communities. To do it at scale and for the plantings to feel as if they had grown out of the place, were in tune and felt right there.
A decade later, I was drawn to Japan to witness a culture of garden-making that drew from nature, but in an altogether more stylised and formal manner. I was moved first by the culture of animism and then, as the differences fell into place, the exquisite soft minimalism that was employed to emulate a wild place and distil a moment. This was the first time I had encountered the feeling of being taken somewhere very particular by a designed space, where every detail spoke to the next and where images were conjured and composed. A dry waterfall of rocks summoning the energy of a choppy watercourse, the dynamism of the imagined water moving clearly in the mind. The best Japanese gardens have soul. The spirit to take you somewhere, to fine tune your senses and put you in the here and now.
In terms of one’s own creative process, the act of looking and making a connection with a place or an artist’s work, contributes to an ongoing internal dialogue and refining a vision. One that is enriched by the new and also honed for seeing that, when things are done well, a place can be transcendent. One such artist who became known for his “emotional architecture” was the great 20th century architect Luis Barragán. His approach to architecture grew out of European Modernism, yet evolved into something softer and more in tune with the way we want to live than the functionalism of a house simply being a “machine for living”. Barragán came to believe that “any work of architecture that does not express serenity was a mistake”.
I have known of his work for some time, for Barragán is also famous for stepping easily between inside and out with his buildings talking to his gardens and his gardens seamlessly reciprocating. It was the first time I had visited Mexico, which was where he grew up and practised and I fell in love with Mexico City and the shock of the new. For the days I spent there on my sabbatical last October, I made a daily pilgrimage to take in six Barragán projects, each with their own identity but with a common language. A reverence for the light that at 2000 metres above sea level is particular to the city and to his brilliant and ingenious use of space and colour.
My first morning there, wide-eyed from my 4 a.m. arrival, took me to see Barragán’s home and studio. Friends who had arranged my tickets (for all of the residences are timed entry only) told me drop into Jardín 17 on the other side of the street whilst waiting. Behind a simple metal gate, and in common with all my Barragán experiences to come, was a world entirely its own. A thin, sloping lot of land with buildings to either side and an unravelling of spaces that drew you into somewhere very particular. A huge wooden plank, bowed in the sunshine, welcomed you with somewhere to sit. Vegetation initially blocked your view until you noticed a concrete step meeting a boulder step down into a lower glade surrounded and overshadowed by vegetation. A dirt floor to the yard within accommodated two rough stone seats to the left backed by lofty yucca and looking on to lush foliage, evergreens and strappy clivia as groundcover.
You naturally took to one of the stone seats to let yourself acclimatise and then you noticed the tall blue wall running along one side of the garden. An Yves Klein blue that resonated in the shadows and threw orange brugmansias into relief. The greens vibrated in the dappled light. A high canopy above formed a green ceiling and threw jagged shadows of yuccas. The sound of the city beyond immediately became secondary.
A dirt path breaking away from the clearing steered you left where an oversailing concrete buttress connected the two boundary walls and framed the garden that continued below on a lower level. At the change of level, water was suddenly revealed catching the light held in a long, narrow trough running the full width of the garden. A metre deep, concrete with chamfered edges so that it brimmed full and animated the garden in a double image. Cool, green water reflecting more brugmansias and the tall, blue wall now higher to your right with a step change into the next level. On and into another glade with Hedera colchica as glossy groundcover, scaling walls and dripping back down in cascades of green. Two stone torsos, one to either side, amongst palm fronds and wide-fingered monstera. A sinuous dirt path down to a building at the end of the garden. An empty urn to the left sitting in evergreens. Steps leading perilously up to a door in the wall, which gave onto the building’s flat roof and views over the city. Roofscapes, a roaring highway below and my first experience of being taken somewhere by the great man himself.
After being baptised in Jardín 17 the wait outside Barragán’s house gave away little of what lay within, with small windows in tall, blank walls and a very low-key street. Once inside, we were guided around in a small tour with strictly no photographs inside and the unfamiliar but worthwhile challenge of having to commit what you saw to memory and look properly. My notebook captured the following;
‘Into a waiting room that used to be the studio. Lofty ceiling. Yellow painted, beams exposed. A high square opening in the wall. White walls, blue sky visible, glass vessels in pale colours against the light. Extraordinary leather seats designed by him. Hung leather. Huge scale. Into the first open courtyard. A company of green vessels. Empty, standing side by side on square lava-stone tiles over a foot across. A square pool in the corner with a wooden water shute. The sound of water echoing. Tall walls, sky and dripping foliage from outside falling in. A pink square door leading to the garden. Terrace of the same continued lava stone alongside a four-paned picture window forming from inside a cross. This motif repeated – Barragán was deeply religious. A huge pepper tree smothered in ivy leaning against the house and never pruned. Apparently he loved leaning trees. Wooden benches backdropped by boundaryless vegetation. A circular, rough-hewn water bowl. No sense of the size of the garden. A depth of green and the life within it. Immersive and generous and setting the scene for every window that looked out from the back of the house. A contrast to the small windows that looked onto the street in the other direction.
Once inside, control and emptiness, a soft minimalism of rustic materials so directly contrasted with the vegetation. Wood, hide lampshade, pale walls. The colours used so sparingly, but with such confidence. The hallway of black lava stone making a black stair with no handrail. White, rough plastered walls. A gold leaf Mathias Goeritz painting reflecting gold back into the space from a high window at the top of the stairs. Turn the corner on the landing to a yellow wall reflecting yellow into an intimate corridor to his room and the guest room. Pale, off whites, solid wooden furniture. Silver orbs reflecting the interiors and windows a second time. Another Mathias Goeritz with a black horizon line hung low so that the sofas became part of its world. Generous windows. The green from outside filling both bedroom windows.
Up through a small study of the same muted colours to a solid wood, narrow staircase to a rooftop. Terracotta tiles. Tall white walls, blue sky. The wall you enter through a curious toffee-coloured orange. Round the corner to three pink walls, 4m tall. Two pinks to emphasise the contrast of the light. Vegetation hanging from outside. The branches of the pepper tree from below. Bougainvillea in Mexico suddenly making sense.
Downstairs a high, square window with a grid of many panes and frosted to capture vegetation shadowed from the streetside. Something of a Japanese shoji screen, but so much its own thing. The vast four-paned window onto the garden. Green, green backdrop. Cantilevered staircase, wooden. Cantilevered shelves floating with heavy objects. Masks. Ceramic skull, more silver orbs. Lamps made from sown squares of leather. Boxy, strong, bold. A giant fire grill. A square in the wall for the fire. Turntable and records. Soulful. Perfect proportions. Small spaces giving way effortlessly to lofty rooms that move through the house but are always separated by the intimate spaces. You could imagine living there.’
I shall return to Mexico just to see this house again. The place he took five years to build and perfect his vision and from which he planned so many of his other works. Places I visited one after the other. Next the Casa Pedregal, a show home for wealthy owners, set in a raw acre of exposed lava, the natural landscape of the area. Inside, the house was painted in twelve shades of grey. Often three per room to play with the feeling of the light shifting within the volumes. Outside the house was painted pink and grew straight out of the lava to remind you of the volcanoes and surrounding the city which, when the house was first built, were very much part of its view.
Alongside the lava field, colonised with indigneous plants of the region, a lava stone terrace, cut from the very material that made up the landscape, surrounded a green swimming pool. Green against the pink walls and the simplest of showers in a bent copper tube and ‘bike rack’ stand for towels. Inside, on the lower levels, the lava was literally allowed to flow into the rooms continuing the feeling of the elemental.
Barragáns use of colour is very particular and the next three projects played with this as a central theme. Each very differently. In contrast to the dove-grey interiors of Casa Pedregal, and built in 1976 when Barragán himself was in his mid-seventies, was Casa Gilardi. A party house focused around a jacaranda tree in a central courtyard. Once inside, the house, which stands clear in the street for its pink and blue walls, you are invited into a cool white hall from which a door opens onto a side-lit yellow corridor. A yellow that literally glows and makes your breath quicken when the door opens and then again when the door at the far end opens into the pool room. The top lit pool room has a coral wall plunging into water and refracting its presence against a blue rear wall. It was colour that quickened your pulse and felt joyous for being energised by the light that was allowed into the room to activate it.
Barragán played with colour repeatedly, in a way that we would never be able to here in the softer light of Britain. His work referred to its strong use in the culture, to tagetes and wild cosmos, to the elementals of bone, leather, dirt and stone. I saw it from afar as we approached Torres de Satellite, the soaring concrete needles that were made in collaboration with the sculptor Mattias Goeritz and that celebrated the arrival to the city from the north.
And then again at the Cuadra San Cristóbal stables. A commission built for horse people where the house, the only white building within the walls of the complex, was tucked into a corner so that your eye was drawn into the stableyard where the theatre of horses was played out. A water shute from a terracotta-coloured wall drew you on beyond the pepper trees and their shadows at the entrance. Then, upon entering the stableyard, you were presented with an unfolding of walls of vibrant pink and blue with openings which stepped them over the sand yard, which protects the hooves of the animals. The yards moving around a pale, shallow water tank for washing down the horses and reflecting the colours again, but revealing everything differently. It was hard to see where the buildings began and where they became landscape and, reassuringly, where landscape was allowed to underpin the whole.
But perhaps my most memorable Barragán experience, and the one that I truly believe transcended our earthed realities, was the Capuchin Convent Chapel in the Tlalpan neighbourhood in the south of the city. A project in which Barragán made an extraordinary commitment. He gifted his time to the nuns and, over the ten years it took to complete the project, he also raised the money needed to build the chapel. In turn the nuns gave him complete control, so he designed with a freedom that feels altogether on another level. Once again, and perhaps this is why it remains etched in my mind, we were not allowed to take photographs.
My memory of the inner sanctum is clear in my mind, for the clarity of his vision and for the bold move of immersing you in a chapel that quite literally glowed once you were inside it. The walls and the ceiling and the very cross itself were painted a warm, deep orange and backlit by yellow stained glass that threw the shadow of the cross onto the luminous wall behind it. We were bathed in colour, the warmth of it and its stillness and for a moment I felt I wasn’t fully in my own body and somehow elevated. But all too soon we were cast back out onto the street and reality. Bettered perhaps for getting closer to a higher power and beginning to feel it was Barragán’s.
Words & photographs | Dan Pearson
Published 18 January 2025
