Mexico's Master of Serenity

By A.T.Bake

aLuis Barragan wins his profession's richest prize

The most vivid childhood memory of Architect Luis Barragan is of a water system in a village set in the red hills near the Mexican city of Guadalajara. "Great gutted logs, in the form of troughs," he remembers, "ran on a support system of tree forks, five meters high, above the roofs. This aqueduct crossed over the town, reaching the patios, where there were great stone fountains to receive the water. The channeled logs, covered with moss, dripped water all over town. It gave the village the ambience of a fairy tale."

All his life Barragan, the drip and plash of that water in his memory's ear, has sought to re-create the serenity and beauty of the little village's patios, places of refuge for body and spirit. Last week his success was recognized with the prestigious $100,000 Inter national Pritzker Architecture Prize, created last year by the Hyatt Foundation to do for architecture what the Nobel Prize does for other disciplines. Declared the citation: "He has created some of our most unforgettable gardens, plazas and fountains, all magical places for meditation and companionship."

In most ways, Barragan is a maverick in the architectural establishment. He has frequently deplored what he calls "architects' architecture" and admits no debt to the International Style of the Bauhaus. He uses the plainest of materials -- adobe, raw beams, cobbles -- to create astringently el egant effects. His commitment is not to community or social function but to privacy: "Any work of architecture that does not express serenity is a mistake. That is why it has been an error to replace the protection of walls with today's intemperate use of enormous glass windows." Many of his devices serve absolutely no function except visual delight; he thinks nothing of erecting a free standing wall simply to catch the shadow of a nearby tree. Where others speak of views, Barragan celebrates the walled garden. Says he: "A landscape that is held and framed with a proper foreground is worth double." He would like the garden to be living room "to give back to modern man the treasure of having more private life." This vision of a garden is firmly rooted in his Mexican landscape, its blazing sun, its crystalline skies; it would scarcely suit a dour climate.

A rancher's son, Barragan spent much of his youth riding horses, attending fiestas and visiting marketplaces. He planned to be a rancher himself, but his mother insisted that he have a profession. He chose civil engineering but developed an interest in architecture while taking his degree at the University of Guadalajara. Before settling down to work, he spent two years in Europe, where he was charmed by "the architecture of the poor"--by Greek villages, which he had visited, by Moorish souks, which he had not, but had studied in books. Most of all, he fell in love in with the walled, closed-in Arab garden, animated and cooled by the splash of a fountain or stilled by a pool, whose apotheosis he found in the marvelous intricacies of Spain's Alhambra.

On returning to Mexico, he helped run the family estate and did not devote himself solely to architecture until 1936, when he was 34. He soon found that clients irritated him with their whims. "I am such that I must work without a patron," he explained. He began designing and building houses to suit himself, in subdivisions he bought himself.

In 1944 his eye fell upon an inhospitable stretch of land on the edge of Mexico City, known as El Pedregal, a huge lava desert left from the eruption of the Xitle volcano 2,500 years ago. Fascinated by the savage beauty of the lava's shapes, Barragan and a partner bought 865 acres of the land and began to transform it. Each plot was to be a walled garden, celebrating the lava's strange forms, the cacti and the twisted trees known as palo bobo (silly tree). Each house was to be as simple as possible and should not occupy more than 10% of the plot. Steps and pathways were carved into the rocks. Lava was used to form the walls; for variety, they were sometimes stained rust, pale green, pale blue or --the favorite color of the Mexican peasant--bright pink. Water was run over craggy stone or along the wall tops, seeping down to aid the growth of moss. On the street side, the walls were blank, shutting out the city and its noise. Buyers were few at first, but eventually the once despised El Pedregal lava plain became Mexico City's most elegant residential area.

In each of Barragan's designs his public spaces achieve that degree of serenity which only flowing or still water can bestow. In Las Arboledas, developed as a residential community for horse lovers, he installed fountains, pools and a brimming watering trough as long as a lake, whose still surface reflects the thickly set eucalyptus trees. In another subdivision devoted to horsemen, Barragan converted two abandoned horse troughs into a heroically scaled fountain: a massive red earth stucco wall carries an aqueduct that pours water into the pool, all set off by a long pink stucco wall that makes approaching riders look like figures in an Egyptian frieze.

At 78, Barragan is a towering (6 ft. 6 in.), craggy man of charming mien and Old World manners. He has never married and lives in the house he designed for himself years ago at the edge of El Pedregal. Characteristically it presents a nearly blank wal to the street. For Barragan is above all an architect of seclusion of serenity in a noisy world. Says he: "Art is made by the alone for the alone."

--A. T. Baker

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