Elisa Valero: Casa Barragán, it’s like poetry - a short piece of writing, adding something to your life and remaining forever in mind.
For me, it’s unbelievable that the few hours I spent there, have had such an impact on my work, and sense of being an architect.
UPON ENTERING CASA BARRAGáN, WHAT SURPRISED YOU?
During my studies I became interested in Luis Barragán because he was a Mexican architect who worked with artists. It was close to what I liked. However, I didn’t find the drawings of his own house particularly attractive.
At the time, the ideas of other modern architects such as Le Corbusier, or Mies were more understandable in plan and section. In contrast, Barragan’s drawings did not seem to be driven by any readable order. In the beginning it was very difficult for me to really grasp what he wanted to do.
It was after finishing my studies, when I applied for a scholarship that I first went to Mexico.
Upon entering Casa Barragán, I understood why it had been so difficult to appreciate the building’s value from the drawings. The house is woven around primary bodily perceptions and its quality dwells in how the architect dealt with differences in scale. It’s not possible to reduce what you experience to any sort of diagram, or a typological scheme. It’s even difficult to describe the qualities of this house with words. It’s an example of architecture that needs to be experienced directly, physically, with all the senses. I find it inspiring.
DID BARRAGáN HAVE A METHOD - HOW DID HE DESIGN THIS HOUSE?
This house was neither designed in two-dimensions, or in three. It was conceived in four. And as far as I am concerned, the fourth dimension of space - time, is the most sophisticated factor when considering or making a project. If you want to design a series of spaces, imagining their properties not separately but as a sequence of interrelated phenomena, you must arrive at a simultaneous awareness of all parameters.
We have all had that experience with students, when you ask them to draw a project and they come with their first plans, presenting lines in plan, and calling them a „distribution scheme”. They immediately arrive at a symmetrical floor plan originating from these lines and claim that the project is there. For sure, Barragán was not designing like this, he was making another two steps - thinking in the third and fourth dimensions. It’s a work of high control of the visual relations between diverse moments and the house is incredible example of this.
The drawings reveal it to you, only if you can imagine yourself walking through the project.
IT’S A HOUSE AND AN OFFICE. A PERSON LIVING THERE CAN SPEND ALL THEIR TIME INSIDE. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS COMBINATION?
It is true, it’s one building hosting a place to work and a place to live. However, in reality, you feel, that these two parts are very distant. There is no visual relation between the two, Moreover, they are open to different types of outside space - the house is open to the garden, the office to a sort of a dry patio. There is no clear physical connection. You go from one room to another, crossing spatial thresholds, like in a labyrinth. That’s why the house feels much bigger than it really is.
As for this aspect, I read that one of the most important influences on Barragán’s architecture was the masterpiece I have the privilege to see almost every day - The Alhambra in Granada. In this complex of palaces, you find exactly the same tricks. You can go here and there, zic zac, and arrive in a place you did not expect to find, built in the same language, following the same themes, but somehow different. It’s very surprising. I would even call it magic. You never have a clear idea of the whole. Clearness and legibility are a typical characteristic of modern houses. This house doesn’t celebrate it. The internal fragmentation of a building makes it impossible to immediately grasp it with your mind. It is acquired slowly, whilst walking around, your experience forming paths and spaces within your memory. These kinds of buildings never get boring.
THE CEILINGS IN THE MAIN ROOMS ARE VERY HIGH. I IMAGINE AN ATMOSPHERE OF AN OUTSIDE SPACE.
The main space indeed looks a bit like a public space. It’s like a street in a small town. It is a totally different way of living than in a normal house where all spaces are of the same height, similar to each other, always connected in the same way.
The entrance to the big room is through a very low door. You must cross this compression space to arrive in the high space - it’s a striking moment of contrast.
You discover a kind of interior paradise, where you do not feel the presence of a roof anymore. This is made even stronger through the seamless continuity between interior and exterior. The interesting thing about the big window in the main room is that it’s only about a visual relation between the interior and the garden, not a physical one. You cannot pass there. Somewhere else you have a small, invisible door, where you go out. Thanks to the decision of separating the visual from the physical properties of the opening, you can have a window without a frame, that really blurs the border between inside and outside.
It is a highly sophisticated composition made from very simple elements - that have been carefully ordered by individual senses. It looks plain but is very smart and driven by spatial intentions, not by functional flexibility. One needs to be very attentive to make decisions of this kind.
THE STANDARD SOLUTION IN THIS PLACE WOULD BE A BIG SLIDING DOOR.
It would have also been very expensive. Barragán’s goal was not to make one room out of main space and the garden, but to create a sort of tension. The garden is very close, you see it but there is something that separates you from it.
YOU MENTIONED BEFORE THAT THIS HOUSE IS AN „INTERIOR PARADISE”. IS CLOSING YOURSELF OFF A QUALITY THAT HELPS TO ACHIEVE A SENSE OF DOMESTICITY?
A house has to go along with a place. You cannot find the same conditions in the south of Britain where you have grassy, undulating hills, and in the centre of Mexico, with all the noise, crowd, and exhaust fumes. It has to go along with the tradition, with the sun and the density.
I think that a house is a place to rest, and to stop from the running of the day. Nowadays more than before, we need silence. If your house is open to the landscape and has wonderful views, it is also a place where you don’t need to protect yourself, you are in a silent place. If you are not, then the only way to give a house a sense of calmness is to close yourself off, to carefully increase the levels of protection and create something independent and internally rich.
CASA BARRAGáN DOESN’T LOOK OUTDATED, IT GROWS OLD ELEGANTLY. WHAT GUARANTEES ARCHITECTURE A TIMELESS QUALITY?
Firstly, Barragan worked with simple classical materials, which were not bound by each age’s contemporary technology. He used white or pink walls that could have been built both a thousand years ago and today. Secondly, formally speaking, he designed very simple shapes, that were easy to make and avoided putting too much attention on the need for exquisite execution.
Another important aspect of this apparent timelessness was his relationship with tradition, and particularly his acknowledgment and respect for construction wisdom and the feeling of daily routines that are passed down through Millenia. He really was aware of a greater context and that perhaps brought a relativity and honesty to each moment of the spaces he made. He also rejected working in a picturesque, romantic way and instead strove for abstraction. Thanks to these decisions Barragán was never a fashionable architect. His work was and is out of time.
WE CAN FIND SEVERAL SYMBOLS IN THE HOUSE, SUCH AS THE ANGEL AND THE CROSS OF THE WINDOW FRAME. SOMEHOW IT FEELS THAT THE HOUSE COULD HAVE BEEN MADE SPECIFICALLY TO HOST THEM. BARRAGAN WAS KNOWN FOR BEING A MAN OF FAITH. DID THIS INFLUENCE HOW THE HOUSE WAS CONCEIVED?
I think that most of these objects, including the cross, had nothing to do with religion. Many of these pieces, like the sculptures are very old and are just part of his life and what he collected. Obviously, we can find an angel, but then there is also a Mexican, and a collection of pre-Hispanic figures, they were all very important to him. I think he was a person of deep spirituality and self-consciousness, but the scenography of the house is not intentionally symbolic.
When he talked about the beauty of simple things, he spoke about the importance of not being materialistic. This attitude is totally liberating and allows more attention to be given to non-material aspects, which in architecture are proportion, light, scale etc. The house’s richness is born out of poverty, of being free from the attachment to things, not giving a material value to them and instead appreciating their innate presence, the beauty and elegance of objects that do not represent anything other than what they physically are.
IS CASA BARRAGáN MEANT TO STIMULATE SPIRITUAL GROWTH?
Well, everyone needs a place to live - a shelter that requires a defined configuration. I believe that fostering the sense of beauty and proportion, trying to create a value while working with nearly nothing, goes together very well with the process of spiritual growth.
I cannot remember the materials of Casa Barragán. I remember the proportion of the space, the light and colour, which are both abstract phenomena. He used the simplest timber, simple walls, mortar, and plaster. The same as you can find in a thousand of normal uninteresting houses built with same basic materials and budget.
He didn’t try to exhibit technical control, or express power through his architecture.
In case of Barragán, it was about how to do more with nothing, just with space, air, and light - which all come for free.
IT’S CLEAR BARRAGáN HAD A CAREFUL AND ATTENTIVE EYE, HOW DID HE BECOME ATTUNED TO THIS?
From the early years of his life, he went with his father to the old Mexican towns of his region, discovering the beauty of a wonderful tradition and its relationship with nature.
The roots of all that he did are there, in these remote dusty old places, not in a school of architecture. Obviously, later in his life he became an intellectual, spending time meeting his artist friends. There was an elaborate culture of seeing in his closest circle. The abstraction in art began in the 20th century and was very present in the way of thinking of all the people he was surrounded by. It’s interesting to mention Willhelm Worringer’s influential book „Empathy and Abstraction” published in 1916. It proposes a provocative hypothesis that the abstraction in primordial art stemmed from the necessity to control nature and was originally a response to feelings of fear or anxiety. Worringer saw geometisation and simplification as a way of controlling the unpredictable. Once we feel safer the empathetic mind takes over and we start to get interested in the natural, organic beauty. Traditional Mexican architecture can be interpreted as a story of coexistence between these two emotions, and this is where Barragan trained his sense of observation. He was exposed to elaborate articulations of the whole spectrum of human feelings. These early experiences with a very typical ruralness grounded the basis from which his abstractionism but also his particular plastic, empathetic sensibility developed from.
HOW DO YOU TRAIN THE ART OF SEEING?
Beauty is like an animal. If you run at it, you are never going to see it and you will never learn anything.
You must be quiet and patient.
We as architects need to be like hunters, in the sense of those acting on pure thoughtful necessity, those who learn how to recognise the footprints and signs in the ground of different animals, of different intentions and be able to understand, to interpret, wait.
Today students have access to an infinite source of images, and still, they cannot see. We are with them to share what we see. I think that this is the sense of all teaching.
The most important thing that we can do with our students is to share our way of seeing. We need to reveal beauty and help them to discover the beauty that exists in the simplest things. It’s impossible to learn that only from a book.
I had a friend, who died a few years ago, Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas. He was an architectural son of Barragán. He spent some time in Mexico at the beginning of his career and we shared a special interest in Barragán. We used to walk and talk together. We would just discuss and explain what we saw. I learnt a lot with him. Sometimes it’s not easy to describe what is obvious to you, but it’s worth the effort. It helps to appreciate things more deeply. To make sense of things that come to you naturally, I think, it’s really important to try to make things explicit, and fix down some understanding.
23.10.2021
