Casa Luis Barragán

Silence, colour and light made habitable

Luis Barragán · 1948

Story

Built in 1948 as the architect's own home and studio in Mexico City, Casa Luis Barragán is the clearest built statement of Barragán's "emotional architecture" - a search for beauty, serenity and repose rather than functionalist display. Behind a deliberately plain grey street wall lies a sequence of rooms and a walled garden orchestrated around light: tall shuttered windows, monastic volumes, and planes of pink, ochre and violet drawn from Mexican vernacular and rendered timeless.

The house distils Barragán's influences - Mediterranean vernacular, Mexican convents, the gardens of Islamic Spain - into something entirely personal, where a shaft of sunlight on a coloured wall becomes the true subject. In 2004 it became the only individual house in Latin America inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it remains a place of pilgrimage for architects the world over.