Jardines del Pedregal quickly became the Beverly Hills of Mexico City, garnering international praise and the attention of the city’s social and political elite, including a handful of the country’s former presidents who bought homes in the community. “This was arguably the largest, splashiest modernist residential development in the world at that time,” Eggener says. In reaction to the industrial European International Style that predominated in the ‘20s and ‘30s, here, for the first time, was a uniquely Mexican modernism. Through the use of striking colors, local materials like limestone and cypress wood, and native handicraft, Barragán’s work emphasized place and culture, breathing warmth into early modernist principles. Pedregal’s homes fused minimalist design with the dramatic aspects of traditional Mexican architecture. In the late 1940s, after purchasing large plots of the inexpensive, unforgiving land, Barragán got to work on demonstration gardens, public plazas, and homes that blended seamlessly into the landscape, integrating rough, natural stone into smooth concrete structures and creating vertical gardens for creeping indigenous vegetation. Rivera, who was then building a museum of local volcanic rock in Pedregal, drafted a master plan that emphasized the importance of preserving the site’s unique geographic character. According to Keith Eggener, Professor of Architectural History at the University of Oregon and author of Luis Barragan’s Gardens of El Pedregal, Barragán approached Rivera to assist him with guidelines for Pedregal’s development. Rivera and Luis Barragán both saw the area as ripe for urbanization, an answer to the city’s shrinking housing supply.
Artists like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera saw Pedregal as the primal heart of the country: a wild, remote stretch, untainted by European imperialism and rich with legends of the indigenous people who built their temples there. In the 1930s, Mexico’s bohemians flocked to the undeveloped Pedregal (Spanish for “stony place”) to photograph, paint, and hike in the fresh mountain air, miles from the rapidly expanding city’s pollution.
In its heyday, Pedregal was a masterpiece now, thanks to a fervent local collector, it is once again a place of pilgrimmage for modernist enthusiasts. The upscale neighborhood, named Los Jardines del Pedregal, was master-planned with input from Mexico’s most famous artist, Diego Rivera, and built on the jagged lava formed by an ancient eruption of the Xitle volcano. His archives are stored in a basement in Switzerland.īut Barragán’s magnum opus, an architectural wonderland long forgotten on the outskirts of Mexico City, is stepping back into the spotlight. To date, just one retrospective of the architect’s work has been held in his own country. His former home and studio, Casa Luis Barragán-the only private residence in Latin America to be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site-is now a small, unassuming museum with reservations-only admission and is little known to locals. Much of his body of work (numbering only sixty or so projects), has been razed in the face of development. Within Mexico, however, the artifacts of his legacy have either disappeared or been hidden in plain sight. Fashion houses from Louis Vuitton to Longchamp have shot campaigns in his homes, artists James Turrell and Dan Flavin have cited him as inspiration, and contemporary architects such as Japan’s Tadao Ando and Austria’s Mark Mack build on Barragán’s style. Outside of Mexico, Barragán-who is often compared to Frank Lloyd Wright for the way he integrates buildings into their surrounding landscapes-has enjoyed posthumous fame. Even his signature shade of deep pink is now the city’s official color, splashed across taxis and metro stations. Recently named 2018’s World Design Capital by the World Design Organization (the first city in the Americas to receive the honor), Mexico City is steeped in Barragán’s influence. Its unique visual language, a modernism made Mexican, owes a major debt to one artist: the architect Luis Barragán.
A riot of bold colors, stucco surfaces, and geometric angles, Mexico City is a design-lover’s dream.
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