Double dose of Barragan

This morning I caught the metrobus down to Tlalpan, the town which is "what Coyoacan used to be." It's farther south than UNAM, towards the edge of the city. It's actually quite quaint with small cobblestone streets, charming buildings, and sleepy plazas.

I met my coworker Sergio at the Capilla de las Capuchinas, actually a small covent still inhabited and run by the Capuchin nuns. It was designed in the early 60s by Mexican architect Luis Barragan, and is considered to be one of his best works.  Also the cheapest, at only M$60. All the other Barragan buildings charge M$200.

After the tour by one of the nuns, who was apparently the only on-duty nun for the morning, we rushed over to the Casa Barragan, the house of the architect himself south of Chapultapec park. Sergio had arranged for a tour in English on my behalf.

In a certain sense, if you've seen one Barragan, you've seen them all- each successive building is just about particular moments or emphasizing his core design philosophies. To be fair, you could do a lot worse. As I've said before, Barragan is a master composer of light and color. There is a certain humanity in his work which really reminds me of Aalto- a tour guide mentioned Barragan as a master of emotionally evocative architecture- really thinking about about how spaces make people feel.

Barragan's biggest trick is making minimalism human- he forms spaces with nearly nothing in them, but with texture, light, and color, makes them interesting and warm and inviting. The use of textures and scale and wood really remind me of certain modernist Finnish architects, as well as shades of Japanese. While Barragan studied Japanese architecture and landscape architecture, there is actually a lot of Moorish influence in his work, from his time in Morocco. Spaces are never vast, except vertically. Spaces are broken up with screens, visual barriers, partial height walls. In traditional Arabic form with the emphasis on inward looking and privacy, the exterior patios are surrounded by very tall walls to the point that one can only see sky. But they are still scaled to feel open, I never felt imprisoned in them.

The Cappuchin order has a special veneration for St. Francis of Assisi, who lived an life of austerity. This austerity led the nuns to select the minimalism of Barragan, who true to his word, created a chapel with little "decoration."

However, and perhaps this is the architect perspective, I would argue that Barragan created a place with real warmth and even sensuality- Ando is austere, Mier is austere, Barragan with his spatial compositions and wood and play of light and color is nearly baroque. To many religions, light is a metaphor for the sanctus spiritus. To some, the sun is deity itself. It follows that the manipulation of light plays a huge role in religious architecture, especially Catholic buildings with it's particular orientation requirements.

One enters the chapel from the rear. Above the entry, there is a wood screen brisolet as wide as the chapel and fills the wall to the ceiling. Beyond is a balcony for more seating, and a massive yellow stained glass window which fills the wall. The filtered yellow light streams through the white wood screen, and lights up the triptych behind the alter. The triptyc is composed of three panels covered with gold leaf. For those seating in the pews, the gold panels radiate golden light. It's a lovely space that can take your breath away.

Again, there is more half-walls, wood everywhere, the same furniture and cabinetry designer Barragan used in all of his projects. What makes it different from his houses is that there is a feeling of greater serenity here. When one wanders the ancient convents of Mexico, with its white vaulted corridors, courtyards, and use of light, one can feel the same sense of peace and tranquility.

Barragan himself was a deeply spiritual man. His home was filled with religious art and sculpture, and he had a spacious private patio on his roof which he used only for prayer and meditation.

Austere, he was not. His bachelor pad home (although he had numerous girlfriends and women in his life, he never married) was over 1000 sqm and included spaces for three(!) housekeepers and a chauffeur. He loved music and hid speakers and stereo equipment everywhere, and many of the spaces in his home  reveal themselves with great drama. He had a lot of crap, including a vast library of books.

Some other surprising facts about Barragan:

• Total control freak, he pushed dining tables against walls to ensure that he could be the only head of the table.
• He was a few centimeters short of being 2m tall, massive for a Mexican, and pretty damn tall by any measure.
• For a sculptor of light and color, he graduated with a degree in... civil engineering.
• He was a developer-architect. His business model was to buy land, build properties, and sell them.

There are few more places designed by Barragan I would like to see, and then its time to move on to the Mexican architect widely regarded as carrying Barragan's torch to the massive, commercial scale, Legoretta.