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50 T he day I met Luis Barragán is hard to forget. On the way to his house in a surprisingly modest Mexico City neighborhood, I was caught in a sudden hailstorm. The pelting of ice pellets made it even harder to find his house and studio compound, whose plain plastered walls were hardly different than any of the surrounding buildings. It was 1981. I was an architecture student at Rice University and had managed with the help of mutual friends to get an invitation to spend an afternoon with my idol. The anonymous exterior of the Tacubaya compound, where he lived and worked from 1948 until his death in 1988, conceals one of the seminal buildings of the 20th century. It was here that Barragán developed his mature architectural language merging the traditional colors and textures of Mexico with the abstract white planes of the international modern movement. The house avoids the large expanses of glass favored by fashionable architects of that era; the rustic wood beams and floors recall the vernacular buildings of rural Mexico. Yet the house, with its famous cantilevered wood stair that seems to defy gravity, is unmistakably modern. The building was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004 and now operates as a house museum open to visitors by appointment. At more than six feet, six inches tall, Barragán was an elegant gentleman with impeccable manners. That afternoon at his house in Tacubaya, he suggested I study Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico in order to better understand his own work — and there's certainly a great resonance between his architecture and the haunting, surreal streetscapes for which de Chirico is famous. The only piece of art that caught my attention that day was a painting in Barragán's study by Bauhaus color theorist Josef Albers. But it's well documented that two local artists also greatly influenced Barragán: Chucho Reyes, a hometown friend whose paintings of horses and roosters celebrate the intense colors of a Mexican market, and Mathias Goeritz, a German minimalist who immigrated to Mexico in 1949 and is responsible for the gold-leaf panels that Barragán deployed to reflect natural light in many of his buildings. L uis Ramiro Barragán Morfín was born in 1902 in the state of Jalisco, where his family owned a ranch in Mazamitla. While he's widely acknowledged as Mexico's most important architect, he actually studied engineering, not architecture, at the University of Guadalajara. Barragán's work was published in the United States as early as 1931, when Architectural Record featured a series of his Mediterranean- inspired houses in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco, over several issues. An influential exhibition curated by Emilio Ambazs at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1976 introduced Barragán's work to a wider audience. He became an international celebrity at age 78 when he won the second Pritzker Architecture Prize ever given. (The Pritzker, intended as the architectural equivalent of a Nobel Prize, was first awarded to star architect Philip Johnson in 1979.) The choice of an admired but reclusive Mexican architect as the second recipient of the award surprised many. Throughout much of his professional life, Barragán used the profits from his real estate ventures to support an architecture practice limited to producing exquisite work for friends and iconic landscape features for his suburban land developments. He started developing speculative residential work as soon as he relocated to Mexico City from Guadalajara in the 1930s, following the traumatic Cristero War that pitted the Catholic Church against the anticlerical post- revolutionary government that would control Mexico for the next 70 years. Barragán was a devout and supportive Catholic, as evidenced by the chapel he designed for the Capuchin Sisters in the Tlalpan borough of Mexico City MY AFTERNOON WITH BARRAGÁN Rafael Longoria, University of Houston's ACSA Distinguished Professor of Architecture, recalls his visit — 36 years ago — with the great Luis Barragán in the architect's Mexico City home. He examines Barragán's legacy in Mexico's capital, a convent and five houses that would define a new architectural language, then looks at his unfinished commission for Dominique de Menil in Houston, a building that would have challenged the prevailing Menil grisaille with a jolt of color. LEFT: LUIS BARRAGÁN: MEXICO'S MODERN MASTER, 1902 - 1988 (THE MONACELLI PRESS, 1996), PAGE 117. RIGHT, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BARRAGÁN: THE COMPLETE WORKS, REVISED EDITION (PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS, 2003), PAGE 123; IBID., PAGE 115; LUIS BARRAGÁN: THE QUIET REVOLUTION (SKIRA, 2001), PAGE 115; IBID., PAGE 231; IBID., PAGE 285. Folke Egerstrom House's horse pond, 1966-1968