Casa Luis Barragán: the architecture of solitude

Originally published in Cereal Magazine Volume 15

To live is to learn to die. A statement freed from its morbidity, here, on the roof terrace at Casa Luis Barragán. A statement contained between the sky, and the clay tiles, and the high walls which conceal the rest of city from view. 

On the roof it is hot, and harsh, and later there will be shade. Vertical planes of terracotta orange and medicinal pink combine in the eye to create an abstract composition; beneath your feet, a de Chirico grid extends and hits the wall at a right angle. Perspective, but no sense of scale. No furniture, no signs of life but the vines which spill lascivious across a corner. Barely visible, a simple cross casts a shadow on the wall.

This is a place of constructed horizons. It is an acknowledgment of absolute solitude.

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Solitude, la soledad, is the origin and the end point of the architecture of Luis Barragán (1902-1988). In his Pritzker Prize acceptance speech in 1980, the Mexican architect cited solitude as a defining principle of his practice, alongside light, beauty, joy and death — death, which here is intertwined with life. If life and death exist as a continuum, then solitude can be understood as the point of intersection; a state in which a man might meet and make peace with his self, and thereby prepare both to enter the world and to leave it behind. As such, the spirit of solitude pervades every one Barragan’s constructions; whether the lava gardens of El Pedregal, the stark and sublime pools of Los Clubes, or the humble Chapel Nasturtiums, designed for a convent of Capuchin nuns.

Nowhere is that solitude more viscerally felt than in the house he built for himself in 1948, located in the former working class district of Tacubaya in Mexico City. Nowhere more so than on the empty roof terrace, the culmination of all the house contains. Here, the building turns itself outwards like a glove, casting the visitor into a paradoxical state of enclosure and exposure; a sudden awareness of the smallness of the self in relation to the outside world.

The rest of the house is an ascent to this moment, when we might, as Barragán put it, take ‘communion’ with our solitude, bearing witness to the paradox of what it means to be alive. As a devout Catholic and adherent of Franciscan philosophy, Barragán believed that the dual nature of life — as both a heaven and a hell — was God’s will, and should be accepted with love and dignity. Moreover, if heaven and hell existed here on earth, then we were already living the afterlife. We therefore had no choice but to live in the moment: a moment split between air and earth, light and darkness, self and other. 

The house can be read as a testament to the split self; to the life of a bachelor who existed ‘either completely surrounded by people, or completely alone’. However, it was Barragán’s peculiar power, both as a man and an architect, to be able to synthesise apparent contradictions into an aesthetic and spiritual whole. He was, after all, a monastic dandy who had made the leap between Mexican vernacular architecture and European modernism; a feat of supreme architectural acrobatics which could only have been achieved by a maverick autodidact. 

Trained as an engineer, Barragán’s architectural education was drawn from direct experience: from the adobe structures and aqueducts he had known as a boy in Guadalajara, and the theories of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus which he later encountered during his travels in Europe. Free from the shackles of ‘good practice’, Barragán’s approach to architecture was closer to that of the poet who creates a bricolage of disparate elements. In his hands, the puritanical rigour of the International Style was strengthened by the aesthetics of Mexican necessity: the use of natural materials such as wood, stone and clay, thick walls to protect from the heat, strength of colour to compete with the sun. And just as he was free to take on different influences, so he was free to discard them. Barragán later rejected the idea of a Le Corbusian ‘machine for living’, advocating instead for an ‘emotional architecture’: an architecture driven by a belief in the power of beauty to move the body and the mind.

That dynamism — which is also a sort of stillness — is felt from the moment of entering the house. Crossing the threshold from the blind, barred exterior, we enter a narrow passageway of tinted yellow light, light which turns the volcanic tiles pitted and soft. Ahead, the thick adobe walls compress the space still further, impelling us towards the central vestibule — where we are assaulted by a brash, euphoric, Barragán pink. 

Here, where Barragán used to sit and make phone calls, every horizontal and vertical is designed as part of a precise line drawing: light falls in a perfect square on the desk and the black stone steps rise like Jacob’s Ladder. And yet, all it takes is an open door to transform the vestibule into the epicenter of motion, splitting the stillness into multiple directions — doors opening to the kitchen, the library, the dining room, and the staircase which leads to the bedrooms and the roof. At the top of the stairs, like the sun which fuels all movement, is a canvas by Mathias Goeritz coated entirely in gold leaf. It is as though an altarpiece from a Spanish baroque church had been melted into a single square. 

Already, we are freed from functionalism, from the ‘cold convenience’ of fashionable modernism. But if Barragán intended for beauty to move us to a state of spirituality, it is a beauty neither clean-cut nor wholly monastic. Instead, it is closer to what the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘pied beauty’, a paradoxically pure mixture of ‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’. The phrase might also be used of the devotional objects which Barragán accumulated on his travels, a haphazard hoard of polychrome effigies, memento mori skulls and gilded angels — objects of gold, blood and thorns which find their most minimal —and most excessive —expression in Goeritz’s painting.

There’s no doubting Barragán’s spiritual sincerity, but his expressions of monkish values aren’t devoid of irony. In the reception rooms, asceticism is performed as a bachelor’s caprice: a modernist version of a monk’s lectern is used to display paintings, and the dining room table is arranged to point towards the wall. This way, only the host may orchestrate the conversation, as though he were a Dean preaching the Gospel over dinner. There’s a self-consciousness to these spaces, which become display cabinets for showpieces such as Barragán’’s miraculous cantilevered staircase, or Jesús Reyes Ferreira‘s painting, Archangel, designed to reflect the colour palette of the house. The effect would be claustrophobic if it wasn’t for the floor-to-ceiling views of the garden — carefully tended by Barragán to appear the very image of natural abandon.

In the garden, the house connects as a whole. A Goldenbell tree stretches up to the roof terrace, and a small shaded courtyard leads to Barragan’s studio. Leaves press against the windows of the most private spaces, rooms we never should have entered. The hidden mezzanine where Barragan sat listening to his gramophone, the shutters of the window closing to form a cross. The study with the mirrored pulcheria orbs, objects typically used to ward away flies. And the bedroom with the torn painting of the annunciation — the bedroom where Barragan spent his final hours.

To return to life. In the kitchen, leading off from the vestibule, someone has been cooking. Barragan’s housekeeper still lives here, and the room retains the scent of champurrado and anise. It is a space barely touched by Barragan’s perfectionism — a working kitchen with a low wooden table, overhead lamp, and traditional ceramics displayed on sideboards. With its low light and heavy furniture, the room feels very far from the roof, and yet it is, in a way, its mirror image. A painted plate bears the word ‘Soledad’. A wooden cross, painted the same pink as the wall, rests at at a right angle on the door frame. This was the room where Barragan could partake in a different sort of solitude; a solitude without transcendence, as irrefutable as the human need for food and shelter.

Perhaps now, we are ready to leave. Having arrived, already enclosed. Ready to see life in relation to death, vertical to horizontal, wall to window. To enter, and to walk outside.

     En el silencio de la casa, tú,

     y en mi voz la presencia de tu nombre

     besado entre la nube de la ausencia

     manzana aérea de las soledades.

Originally published in Cereal Magazine Volume 15