My persistence has paid off. I finally got a spot to visit Luis Barragan’s house and studio in the late afternoon. Sitting in the garden of the house next to it, I am now enjoying my coffee and cooling myself down from the emotions. What I saw was like a “crusade,” as I can relate many contempary architects’ signature in this single house: the pristine light with glazing and hidden frame of SANAA, the meditative framing of space and sky found in the works of Tadao Ando, the colored natural lighting of Steven Holl and so on. The fact that cameras are forbidden actually works better for the experience of space: I could relate many rooms and spaces together while walking between them, instead of busying with the camera.
Although the space is fluid and loose, the floor plan itself is an art piece of modernist architecture: clear in dividing functional spaces, consistent and coherent in proportion. It seems Barragan divided himself into two persons, one is a “classic” modernist with knowledge on mechanism and fucntions of a house and modern household functionality, and a Barragan-artist, who let go of logic and perform freely at will. The Barragan-artist would throw random colors on the walls, breach them wherever he wants to let the light in, break down the windows into pieces for different experience of light and air. One who would suddenly insert a void into the middle of the house, dilate the kitchen from the living space, and further divide the dining area into different ambiences. But it could not be a masterpiece of architecture if these two forces of logic and randomness don’t work together. There is a harmony of the elements, a right degree of contrast between tendencies that give the house a conherent character.
Behind these two different “persons,” there is a Barragan – the story-teller. And he does that by mean of space and its interior layout: an inside-out storytelling. We would understand Barragan better if we can imagine what he would think when he steps in the living space and see the painting against the cabinet on the left. What book he would pick from his library’s shelves, and how he contemplate the light from above, detached from the everyday life and serves only the architect himself at that particular moment. I would think that Barragan expresses his own complexity and self-contraditions through this house, by mean of opened and closed spaces, the movement of going up and down, or the adjacency of different functions. The myth might rely on the content of each spaces: the many jars in the contemplated garden, the statue in his office, the booth in the living room, the lamp in the bedroom, the yellow carpet in the dining room, so on and so forth. I helps when we walked in, towards the end of the tour, into the architect’s studio, where I found a series of floor plans with countless notes on them, most of the time following the directions of the walls, to form a closed space just with words. Perhaps the architect cannot wait to draw the section and rather tell the story of space immediately before he gets lost into the device of the floor plan itself. Strikingly, there are drawings in which Barragan “extracts” something from the middle and places it outside of the floor plan as if to indicate the compactness and complexity of each room. The forms of these “solid” pieces themselves are much more abstract than the two dimensional character of the plan, embedded with color, notes, forms, religious symbols etc.
And of course, beside the volume of spaces, where most rooms are interconnected (with half-walls, doors, steps etc), Barragan shows his mastery in activating space by means of textures and materials. It is these physical features and their temporary behaviors under different sources of light (from the exterior or interior spaces) that advocates the complexity and versatility of Barragan’s inner story, which is timeless.
