Luis Barragàn: The Color of Paradise

By Maria Finn

While I was in El Paso, my sister-in-law Hilda and I planned a trip to Mexico City. With talk of all the recent kidnappings in Mexico City, my brother Steve wanted to send Hilda's brother, Dennis, along with us for protection. At the last minute, this somehow switched to Hilda's mother coming with us.

In what approximated an apology, before we left my brother told me, "I really intended to send Dennis down to protect my sweet wife. Sorry about this." Then he laughed. "I guess if any kidnappers approach, Cool Breeze can just talk them to death."

Hilda's mother's name is Rosario, but my brother calls her Cool Breeze. She lives in Juarez and sells used car parts out of her house. Apparently she keeps the house shut up tightly. With no cracked windows, it's not only stuffy, but it smells like carburetors and engine grease. My brother, stunned at how uncomfortable the house was, gave her cash to buy an air conditioner. Cool Breeze spent it on more car parts. In August, worried she might die from the heat, he gave her an air conditioner, which she traded for more car parts. He then dubbed her the "Cool Breeze" flowing through the house and doesn't worry about it anymore.

Hilda and Cool Breeze arrived about 40 minutes late to pick me up for the airport. My stress was compounded by the fact that we had to pass the border into Juarez and then possibly deal with bureaucracy once at the airport. But they arrived laughing, and Cool Breeze drove, as always, fast and aggressive, relishing the need to make good time. We passed the border into Juarez, and sped along the main streets. While driving about 50 mph, she had her head turned to talk with me, and we hit a large speed bump. We bottomed out and the car died, teetering on the bump. Cool Breeze didn't miss a beat in her sentence. As she cranked on the ignition, I truly believed we weren't going to make it out of Juarez. I looked out at the feeble light growing in early morning sky, the low, adobe and cement buildings dulled by desert air and factory soot. I was trying to think of some way to exact revenge on my brother for this. But she got us going, sped up, signaled for a right turn, gave a quick jerk that direction, then gunned the engine and pulled into the left lane, between two delivery trucks.

"I guess if anyone was following us, we lost them," I said.

Everyone laughed. Cool Breeze continued chatting with us in the back, only occasionally glancing at the road.
When we arrived at the airport, Hilda told me, "There's no gas in the car. But I didn't want to tell you that until we got here. I didn't want you to stress out."

I was visiting Mexico City with hopes of seeing architect Luis Barragàn's house, recently designated a UNESCO site by the World Heritage Committee. I was fascinated with Barragàn's use of bright, primary colors combined with a sleek, modern aesthetic. Hilda used to live in Mexico City, and she wanted to return and see some theater and gallery exhibitions that usually didn't make it to Juarez. We had made a daily schedule of visits to museums and looked up the plays and restaurants we wanted to visit. On the plane, Rosario, who only spoke her bad and broken English to me, despite my telling her several times that I spoke Spanish, asked me if I had seen the twins volcanoes, PopocatËpetl and IzaccÏhuatl.
"They're very beautiful," she said. "I'm going to call my friends in Puebla and ask them to come and pick us up. We can go spend a few days with them in Puebla."
I turned to Hilda and raised an eyebrow. Apparently Cool Breeze didn't know about the schedule we had written up.
"Don't worry," Hilda said. "I'll handle her."

Mexico City is a very lived-in place– worn by the millions of inhabitants, and dingy from smog, but bright patches of color jump out: Candies on display on the street corners seemed electrified by the bright colors, even communion wafers dyed sky blue, bright pink and mint green were sold as colorful snacks. Almost everywhere, color was like a good natured assault: a red geranium against a blue wall, cups full of cut mango, pineapple, orange and papaya are sold from small tables along the street. Bus stop grottos with porcelain statues of the Virgin and Jesus are the colors of burgundy blood and blue serapes. These are adorned with orange gladiolas and sunflowers that add bursts of colorful piety to the waits for transportation.
In a large part, it was his use of color that made Luis Barragàn an internationally known architect. He adapted the colors of the pueblo, or the people– piÒatas, their streamers all hot colors– fuchsia, sapphire blue, carnival reds; fruit and vegetable markets, the sweet and musky scents of fruits emanate from the mounds of purple, red, green, orange and yellow. These are the nexus of the nation's countryside, where hues of blue and green settle over forests or a setting sun drenches the horizon papaya orange. These colors are adapted and distilled into the everyday, even in Mexico's biggest city.
Born in 1902, Barragàn was the third child of nine in a well-to-do family. He grew up on a ranch, Hacienda Corrales, near the town of Guadalajara. The ranch bordered Lake Chapula, and two simple, profound elements of his childhood were central to his work as an adult– horses and water. In 1920, he started studying to be a hydraulic engineer; at that time, no architecture school existed in Guadalajara.
Though he came from the upper middle class, Luis Barragàn cited Mexican provinces as his inspiration, stating in his Pritzker Architecture Prize acceptance speech, "For me the lessons contained in the traditional architecture of the Mexican provinces have been my permanent source of inspiration: their white-washed walls; the tranquility of their courtyards and kitchen gardens; the color of their streets and the humble majesty of their squares surrounded by shady porches."
Finding Barragàn's house in the neighborhood of Tacubaya proved to be its own adventure: a day spent with taxi cab drivers, asking other cab drivers, asking kiosk owners, calling relatives and asking passers-by. It turned into an impromptu tour of Mexico City, with Cool Breeze always in the front seat carrying on an animated conversation with the driver, which almost always centered on car parts, or changing our plans.

"Hey, he says he'll only charge us $100.00 to drive us to Puebla," she turned and told us.
Another cab driver pointed out the church of St. Judas Tadeo, where on the 28th of each month, the thieves, drug dealers, and, as he put is, "rateros" go to thank their saint for that month's loot and ask him to keep it coming. We drove through the stately and expensive neighborhood and the cabdriver said, "Here's where all the thieves, I mean politicians live."
"He knows how to find some good Aztec ruins," Cool Breeze said. "You want to go there instead of this house?"
We finally found it– a large, boxy house with a cement gray exterior faÁade; the women inside told us it was closed on Sunday. They told us we had to call at 10:00 am the next morning, to get a tour for that same day. Herein lies the benefit of people who are really laid back, like Hilda and her mother. Neither expressed any anger or frustration that I hadn't called ahead of time about it.
"This is kind of a typical Mexico City experience," Hilda told me.
We all shared a large hotel room in the Zona Central in Mexico City. Cool Breeze kept the television on whenever we were inside, and Mexican telenovelas, as well as talk shows blared. These generally shared the theme of women fighting-- so screaming, yelling, and crying were the interior background noise. At night, Cool Breeze didn't sleep much, and I found the only way to get her to stop talking to me was to shut my eyes and pretend I was asleep. The minute I opened them, she started talking at me. Very little to none of it needed to be said. General statements, obvious observations, streams of consciousness came at me in a steady flow. "Do you like figs– they're sweet. Have you ever thought of dying your hair blond? You're pale enough for it. Can you hear all the cars passing by on the street?" As well, in the middle of the night, when I got up to use the bathroom, she was wide-awake in her bed, her legs up in the air, resting against the wall. She asked me, "Where are you going?"
My husband does the same thing. When I awake in the middle of the night, no clothes on, bee lining for our bathroom at home, he inevitably wakes up and asks, "Adonde vas?" At first I answered, "The bathroom" but then started responding, "Brazil" or "Madagascar". At times I want to ask, "Where on earth do you think I'm going?"
This innocuous question irritates me way beyond what it should, but also serves as an insight into why my three brothers are married to women from Mexico and my husband is from Cuba. (We have one sister who is still single.) We're Irish Americans, and apparently Irish Americans and Latinos seem to be a popular combination. Theories abound– Catholicism, large families, mothers who coddle their sons and demand perfection from their daughters. But I think a lot of it has to do with space, both physical and psychological.
Later, friends of mine expressed surprise that I agreed to share a room with Hilda and her mother, I told them it didn't occur to me to do otherwise.
My parents married young and started having children immediately-- they had five of us in seven years, so we grew up as sort of like a litter. I had slept in the same bed as my sister until I left the house at age 19; for much of my childhood I shared a bathtub with at least 2 other siblings, and in the evenings, as teenagers, we crammed onto our large couch and watched television shoulder to shoulder.
Now my sisters-in-law argue over who my parents get to stay with when they visit El Paso. When watching my young nephews, I can't give one of them a bath, without the others jumping in, and just as when we were children, the crowded splashing around lasts until someone pees in the tub. Things like boundaries, privacy, and even quiet time not only have no value, they are feared, not understood, and to be avoided at all costs.
I recognized Cool Breeze's need to talk all the time as fear of empty space. When my husband's neighbors in Cuba heard that I lived alone in New York City before getting married, they felt terribly sorry for me. But I had grown used to the solitude, and came to enjoy the luxury of eating what I wanted, when I wanted. Washing my dishes or leaving them, not coordinating plans, and not feeling like I had to respond to the emotional state of anyone– their bad day, their irritating habits, their needs, their questioning or criticizing my idiosyncrasies. Solitude gives you absolute control over your environment. Once you live that way for a while, it's very hard to venture back into living with another person, let alone the chaos of a family.
The next day we returned to the Barragàn house. For the first part of the tour we walked to a nearby house Barragàn designed, the Gilardi House. Upon entering, you could immediately feel the narrative that connects the different parts of the house. The entry is illuminated with diffused light from above and around, and the amber hallway feels like an entrance into a chapel-- the yellow paint over the windows gives the hallway a religious glow, reminiscent of the stained glass windows of a church. This hallway leads to the dining room that has a swimming pool surrounded by walls painted intense red and blues. The guide told us that the blues of these walls had been inspired by his friend's fighting roosters, and at times, when sunlight traveled across the water, the reflection formed a crucifix. Beyond that room is the patio, the floor created of lava stones. Barragàn always included, or at least referenced water in his designs. Rather than a big central fountain seen in many Mexican courtyards, a small, stone container sat under a waterspout– the expectancy of water, but not water. A lone jacaranda tree shaded the patio. If walking through the house was a mystical adventure, the tree felt like the simple, profound ending to the journey. This type of tree is in bloom during Easter, or the resurrection.
Barragàn was a devout Catholic. In his acceptance of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1980, Barragàn said, "It is impossible to understand Art and the glory of its history without avowing religious spirituality and the mythical roots that lead us to the very reason of being of the artistic phenomenon. Without the one or the other there would be no Egyptian pyramids, nor those of ancient Mexico. Would the Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals have existed?" He also called it "alarming" that publications devoted to architecture seemed to have banished the words, "Beauty, Inspiration, Magic, Spellbound, Enchantment, as well as the concepts of Serenity, Silence, Intimacy and Amazement."
As we stood on the patio made of lava rocks at the Gilardi House, Hilda muttered to me, "This isn't very Mexican."
It did lack the noise and energy of Mexico City, in fact seemed a stark contrast to it.
We both looked at the lone jacaranda tree, along with three organ cacti planted on an upper terrace, the garden felt so tightly controlled, so edited that as much as I admired the way this tree was given center stage, I also had the thought, "I am so incapable of this kind of restraint." I knew, from her comment, that Hilda felt the same way. We had been working on her garden in El Paso, and researching ocotillos, palm trees, agaves, fountains, and searching for a bougainvillea that could make it there. I lived in an apartment in New York City, and my lack of a garden was a torment. I worked part time designing and installing private gardens around the city in the springtime, and with so much shade and harsh winters, the plant materials were very limited. I couldn't live in a climate like this without a bougainvillea in my garden. Not to mention calla lilies, birds of paradise, hibiscus and papyrus. The nearness of Puebla with the Talavera tile would be too tempting– I'd fill a courtyard with containers that would contrast the explosions of colorful flowers with the intricate designs and bright blues. Tiled fountains surrounded by fern-like palma chivos, ponds hosting lilies and water iris, angel trumpets for hummingbirds and jasmine vines sprawling up posts near the house to fill the night air with scent.
Then there were the backyards of my childhood-- of tomatoes and peppers planted and tied to a stake with a piece of rag, odds and ends stored, holes dug by the dog, a cat with more kittens, (the family swears this time she will be fixed) perhaps a used car part or two mixed in, children's bicycles dropped onto their sides, a chunk of wood that might come in handy one day, a grill to cook on, weeds growing robustly out of cracks, a battered hose twisted in many knots, some old work boots mixed with soccer cleats too muddy to bring inside, and a line strapped across the center with laundry flapping from it.
Cool Breeze's backyard was more in line with the disorder I knew growing up, with its cars on cinder blocks, engine parts scattered around them like gutted animals. We stood looking at the lavender walls of the Gilardi courtyard, the stepping-stones of color– yellow then orange that lead your eyes back to the house, inside to the blue and red walls. In Barragàn's work, the primacy of color replaced the primacy of disorder.
A family still lived in this house, and what you could not feel was their presence, their personality, or the rhythm of their lives. While admiring the wood stairs that overlapped a white wall, unencumbered by railings, everyone commented on how you couldn't raise young children in this house, particularly with the swimming pool in the living room. But the tour guide said the family had a young child they watched very, very closely. A young architect from Holland, touring the Gilardi house with us, noted that Barragàn had made everything in the house– the lights, the furniture, the large, round balls of wood or metal installed in the corners. "He still has total control of everything in here," he pointed out.
When Barragàn had finished his studies in Guadalajara, his father sent him to travel in Europe as a reward in 1924. He visited the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, and the Moorish gardens and architecture of this palace would forever inspire him. Decorative gardens, arranged around an irrigation system originated in southern Mesopotamia, and were called "paradise". In Christianity, this word came to mean heaven. Barragàn's love for gardens, and his pursuit of them as small Edens, or at least the promise of serenity is traced back to this experience. A person who shared his fascination with the Alhambra was Ferdinand Bac. On this same trip to Europe, while in Paris, Barragàn went to a decorative art fair and there first saw a garden installation by Ferdinand Bac. Bac was a writer who decided to dedicate himself to garden art. His most well known garden design is Les ColombiËres in Southeast France, near the Italian border, which heavily borrows from Moorish garden design.
Barragàn sought the book, "Jardines Enchante's" in which Bac illustrates journeys through exotic gardens. In pursuing this idea of seeking paradise in gardens as a spiritual journey, or a type of communion, a joining with a greater serenity, Barragàn decided he was a landscape architect. As well in the book, the journey through the gardens is for the protagonist, a pursuit of the unobtainable.

We left the Gilardi house and made our way back a block or so to Luis Barragàn's own home. We stopped and bought bombasas– torta sandwiches covered in a light red sauce and gorditas, mushroom and sausage pressed into corn masa and grilled. My slender but voluptuous, gorgeous sister-in-law Hilda eats about 7 times a day– it's a marvel to me and a joy to indulge with her in Mexico City, where there's a wonderful snack cooked on every street corner. We sauntered back towards Barragàn's house eating our sandwiches and gorditas, passing a soda in a plastic bag between us. Tacubaya was not, and still isn't a trendy or well known neighborhood in Mexico City. And though the exterior of the Gilardi House is bright pink, the exterior of Barragàn's house was gray because he didn't want it to stand out.

Inside, the guide pointed out that you could see the garden from the front door. The hallway walls were painted bright cotton candy pink and the floor was of black volcanic rock that rose up to a stucco hallway.

"Also, notice how the stairs rise up," our guide said. "He wanted it to resemble a volcano eruption."
As we entered the living room, a large statue of Virgin and Child, carved of wood had been placed on a pedestal in the corner.

Barragàn designed houses around the gardens, not vice versa. Large picture windows in his living room opened to the dense green garden out back, with vines hanging from trees, looping past the large windows. Perhaps because it was Mexico's winter, but the garden was only green – refreshing, textured, but not monochromatic, rather a deep, ivy green that seemed to emanate from within. Although nature was an integral part of the overall design, the living room itself was all in modular squares– the window 4 squares, the fireplace a large black square, square tables, and shelves in square modular units. I found this contrast interesting, as nature doesn't make squares.
Barragàn returned to Europe in 1931. Then he went to visit Bac at his famous gardens Les Colombieres and photographed the sketches and drawings Bac had created as plans for a series of garden rooms evoking the spirit of early Italian, Hispanic and Oriental landscapes.

In this same decade, Johannes Itten had taught at the Bauhaus in Weimer, Germany. He became known for encouraging students to explore color and contrast. He developed a color wheel, and developed a theory about how color affected people– it was not merely subjective, but people had personal spiritual and psychological responses to color. He wrote, in his book, The Art of Color, "Color is life, for a world without color seems dead. As a flame produces light, light color. As intonation lends color to the spoken word, color lends spiritually realized sound to form."

However, Itten had bitter adversaries at Bauhaus. Walter Gropius, an architect known for drawing his inspiration from Industrial Classicism, or using technology as a basis for his designs, and precise mathematics for their execution, was a founder and president of Bauhaus. He didn't champion the potential of color for emotional purposes. As Bauhaus became the epicenter of industrial design, the school and philosophy stressed simplicity almost to the point of austerity, and clean lines and monochromatic color schemes erased the messiness of humanity.

Le Corbusier, an influential architect and theorist working in Europe at this time, was openly hostile to color. He believed that all ornamentation should be dispensed of, and championed not just the clean lines of Modernism, but complete function over style. He envisioned homes that resembled, "a machine for living in." He claimed that color was "suited to simple races, peasants, and savages." While in Paris, Barragàn attended lectures by Le Corbusier, met him briefly, and visited his buildings and read many of his books. The clean, geometric lines of Modernism can be seen in Barragàn's designs, but he did not forsake color.

We rounded a corner into his study, where several canvasses of paintings of young, naked women had been stacked.

Our guide saw us looking at them, and explained. "He painted too. Those models were good friends of his." Hilda and I raised our eyebrows at each other. " He had lots of good friends," our guide told us.

Then he went on to tell us that Barragàn had never married-though he'd come close on occasion. He lived and died in his house alone. Nowhere was his solitude more evident than in the small room he took his meals in. He sat at a tiny table, facing the doorway that had a crucifix extending from the doorframe up the wall. Behind, a row of plates decorated a shelf, across a plate the word "soledad" or solitude had been written. The guide pointed that out and said, "Being lonely was his inspiration. To point it out with the word is to make it tangible."
From the chair he sat in, the wall to his left had a large window that provided a view to his garden. The guide told us he wanted to think of God and nature while he ate in solitude. That small dining room with the crucifix seemed like some sort of penance. Octavio Paz wrote in his book, The Labyrinths of Solitude "It is possible that what we call "sin" is only a mythical expression of our self-consciousness, our solitude." I thought of all those naked women in the other room and imagined him to be a very tormented person, wracked with lust and Catholic guilt. But this didn't answer why he stayed so alone.

Perhaps, he wanted control over his environment. (Not too far into his career, he stopped taking commissions, but rather bought real estate and designed houses, gardens, even an entire neighborhood, so he didn't have to bend to the wishes of clients.) In these homes he made stairs that didn't need to be child safe, doors, colors and items of only his choosing, his own pacing, his privacy, prioritizing his job or creative work over duties to family– and feeling in control emotionally as well. It felt a little strange walking through his home, including the bedroom where he grew infirm and then died in 1988. But it did not feel voyeuristic.

In addition to his nudes, Barragàn displayed throughout the house the work of friends and contemporaries who had influenced him. The bedrooms held paintings by Chucho Reyes, whose friendship with Barragàn started in the early 1940s, and it's said that this painter convinced him of the power of color. An Edward Weston print of a nude woman folded over her legs sat in Barragàn's studio. His encounter with Weston influenced the use of light and shadow in his structures. Barragàn's terrace gardens are designed so that the shadows cast by the garden walls create part of the effect. Some doors in his home opened like those in horse stables, and windows cast indirect light across the room. Religious statues and crucifixes were found in some rooms, and riding crops and boots sat in others. You could see what influenced his work, and everything that formed him could be found in his work. Nothing in his personal life seemed absent from his work, except the naked women and the solitude. But perhaps both are a form of desire, brought together in a paradox by his garden. They are at once sensuous and peaceful, a respite from loneliness, a respite from the messiness of long relationships.

Whether Barragàn's need for privacy and control was a weakness, I still sympathized with it. The next morning, I convinced Hilda and her mother that I would be fine going to art galleries on my own, and they were free to do what they wanted. Cool Breeze walked very slowly, and frequently stopped into open shops along the street, so we'd lose her and have to back track and drop into all the shops to find her. It could take us up to a half an hour to make it down one city block. I had tried to cut loose once before, but Cool Breeze said that she felt a responsibility to protect me. I fantasized about sending my mother-in-law on a trip with my brother.

But that last day, I could make a break for it. I acted like I was going to call a cab, but then hurried to the metro. Far from being a dangerous, den of thieves, it resembled an NYC subway– people going to work. I walked briskly through the stations, not having to stop and look for Cool Breeze zigzagging at a pace just a breath away from standing completely still. I walked to the Museum of Modern Art and soaked in the works of many of Barragàn's contemporary's – Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and along with Frida Kahlo. Their work also made Mexico internationally known as a culture of bright colors – there's a boldness and a naturalness to them that are distinctly Mexican. It's said that the painter Rufino Tamayo accompanied his mother to her stall in the Oaxaca market as a child, that was how color influenced him.

Popularity of colors in Mexico extends back to the indigenous people and many examples of this were shown at the nearby Museum of Anthropology. The Toltecs painted murals against a bright red background– the cacao tree is depicted as bright blue, crabs, turtles and snails emerge from the ground in different shades of ambers. If a man had been painted blue, that meant he was intended as a sacrifice for the water god, Tlàloc. The Chimali adorned shields with iridescent yellow and red feathers of tropical birds. Carved and painted masks that are part human and part animal from Guanajuato and Guerrero told of their belief in transformation, that they were not just connected with the wildlife, but one in the same with it.

Brilliant green and blue bird feathers from the Quetzal were used for the headdresses of Aztec royalty– one of their primary gods, Quetzalcoatl is a serpent with quetzal feathers that appeared in fields in the form of dust devils, or one the coast as cyclones. Their books and calendars written with pictograms are made with brightly colored inks, and the different colors used told of the interrelatedness of gods and man, nature and the cosmos. They used these records for planting and prophecy.

Mexico's nature provided the inspiration and basis for these brilliant pigments. These colors come from plants and seashells, bark and stones, birds and flowers– red is not red, it is bougainvillea, fuchsia, blood, poinsettia, rose, and gladiola red. And green is not one color, but jade, forest, moss, mint, and ivy.

A sign at the Museum of Anthropology stated that for the Aztecs, there were not four directions in the world, but five. One their compass, these were indicated by color. North is black, south, blue, west, white, east, red, and at the center of the compass, is the color green, which represents where a person is at any given moment. This color doesn't spread in a circumference, but rather extends both above and below the individual, connecting them to the sky and the underworld. This is the color of Barragàn's paradise, and the color of his solitude.

Works Cited:

Itten, Johannes. The Art of Color. J. Wiley and Sons, 2004. Translated by Kunst derFarbe

Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture. Dover Publications, Inc. 1986. Translated by Frederick Etchells.

Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. Grove Press, Inc. 1961. Translated by Lysander Kemp.

web site : rhonddafrancis.com