What we do with the Shadows

In September 2015, an American conceptual artist named Jill Magid, along with two gravediggers and a bunch of official notaries, entered the Rotonda de los Jaliscienses Ilustres in Guadalajara to dig up the ashes of Mexican architect Luis Barragán. It had been 27 years since the great man had passed away from Parkinson's complications, and his copper urn was (by now) heavily oxidized.

Opening the lid, Magid carefully scooped up half a kilogram of ash – all that remained of one of the 20th century's greatest creative geniuses – and transferred the grey powder into a plastic bag. The next day, she flew back to New York with Luis Barragán in her carry-on luggage.

This is the story of a self-taught architect from Guadalajara who somehow became the grandfather of Latin American Modernism. A man whose not-so-humble, two-bedroom home was considered so culturally significant that UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 2004. His full name was Luis Ramiro Barragán Morfín, but he tended to go by 'Luis Barragán', or even just Barragán. (Like Mozart or Picasso, once you reach a sufficient cultural altitude, one name is enough.)

Born to a wealthy Catholic family in 1902, Barragán is arguably Latin America's most influential architect. He was the first Mexican to win the field's highest honour, the Pritzker Prize, and since his death in 1988 his work and general vibe has taken on a kind of fabled status; so much so that some critics think he's in danger of becoming a caricature.

“More and more, Barragán is becoming the Frida Kahlo of architecture,” Frederica Zanco, head of the controversial Barragan Foundation, once told a journalist. “People ask for pictures... then you see them in a spread in a fashion magazine for something about how pink is the new colour for spring.”

In high-end architectural circles, the phrase 'Barragán-esque' gets chucked around a lot. So what does it mean? Well, Barragán mostly became known as the guy that made modernism fun.

His style was characterised by fearless colour – particularly blues, yellows, and that curious bougainvillea shade of Mexican pink – monolithic shapes, clean lines and other stuff that's harder to quantify: silence, mystery, revelation and solitude.

In Barragán's opinion, shadows were a "basic human need", and he ditched modernism's obsession with glass in favour of private spaces, hidden spaces. Secluded worlds of gentle loneliness.

"In alarming proportions the following words have disappeared from architectural publications: beauty, inspiration, magic, sorcery, enchantment, and also serenity, mystery, silence, privacy, astonishment," he said once. "All of these have found a loving home in my soul."

Architect Louis Kahn called Barragán "completely remarkable" and labelled the artist's UNESCO-listed home – which became known as Casa Luis Barragán – "not merely a house, but House itself." Nobel Prize-winning poet, Octavio Paz, described Barragán's work as "an oasis in the chaos of modernity."

"He was one of the few architects who could make modernism feel ancient, timeless, and deeply human," added historian William J.R. Curtis."

To understand Barragán the architect, you need to get to know Barragán the man. One of nine siblings, Barragán was tall, bald from a young age, and a devout Catholic. He liked to wear foppish English sports coats, ascots, silk shirts and ties. The dude even died in a tailored tweed jacket. He employed a chauffeur and a maid and hung out at equestrian centres. He was generous and warm, but also intensely private (maybe not a surprise, having grown up with eight brothers and sisters). "Art is made by the alone, for the alone," he used to say.

In fact, that's one prevailing criticism of Barragán's work: most of the houses he designed were hidden behind anonymous grey walls, or locked away in gated communities. Even Casa Luis Barragán looks cold and unwelcoming from the outside, like a modernist concrete prison.

He was a famously undemocratic architect – a friendly, inspired, big-hearted snob, but a snob nonetheless. When someone accused him of "only designing homes for rich people" he allegedly shot back, "and horses."

And yet… and yet, his work has this enduring humanism and naked emotion that keeps sucking people in. Even 70-odd years later. More than most architects, his buildings feel alive.

Keith Eggener, another historian, once told a journalist that when he visited Barragán's house in Mexico City, "I remember having this feeling of really wanting to spend the night there – not just to sleep in the house but to sleep with the house."

As a young man, Barragán studied civil engineering, and modernism might have turned out quite differently if he hadn't set sail for Europe in 1924. On his travels, he ingested as many architectural styles as humanly possible – from Bauhaus in Germany to Le Corbusier in France, Islamic frescos in Alhambra and Moorish design in North Africa. In 1925, he visited the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris and got his first taste of radical modernism.

When the young Barragán returned to Mexico in 1926, his brain was practically fizzing with potential ideas. Civil engineering suddenly seemed boring and stale compared to the world of architecture, what he referred to as "the sublime act of poetic imagination."

By the 1930s, Barragán had established himself as a competent architect, and it was around 1936 that his buildings took on a more functionalist style: see the Duplex in the Colonia Hipódromo (1936), or the Four Painters' Studios on Plaza Melchor Ocampo (1939).

But Barragán's real genius was yet to emerge. After two decades trying to blend various influences into a cohesive, original aesthetic, in the 1940s, Barragán finally cracked the code, and over the next few decades he cranked out banger after banger.

Small, one-of-a-kind homes that would re-shape the modernist movement and put Latin American architecture firmly on the map. Barragán-esque had arrived, and it was freaking glorious.

Some of these famous works included Barragán's own home, a colour-dipped sanctuary in Mexico City's working-class Tacubaya neighbourhood; the Chapel of the Capuchinas, a divinely-inspired prayer hall, swimming in yellow light; and arguably Barragán's most iconic work, the Cuadra San Cristóbal, a private-residence-and-horse-stables-turned-modernist-paradise, and a property that practically screams Vogue photoshoot. Photographer René Burri famously captured the project in 1969, and Louis Vuitton even used the space for an ad campaign in 2016.

So now we come to the thorny question. If you haven't heard of Luis Barragán before, why the heck not?

Well, it's a long story. After his death in 1988, Barragán's works, documents and sketches were entrusted to his business partner, Raul Ferrera. In 1993, Ferrera hanged himself across the street from Barragán's house, and the archive passed to Ferrera's widow, who spent years trying to sell it to various Mexican institutions. After a long and complex custody chain, the collection wound up with Federica Zanco, an Italian architectural historian, and her partner, Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of Swiss furniture company Vitra.

In 1994, the couple flew to New York and bought Barragán's entire archive for three million dollars, shipping everything back to a temperature-controlled, underground vault in Switzerland. The collection contained over 13,000 drawings, more than 80 photographic panels, plus endless reams of Barragán's notes, clippings, scribbles and personal correspondence.

In 1996, Zanco set up the Barragan (sic) Foundation to administer the collection, and everything seemed to be going well… until no-one was allowed access. Journalists, historians, architects and students who asked to see Barragán's archive were politely (or sometimes not-so-politely) turned away. The Foundation also tried to control Barragán's name and image licensing rights, and their prickly, litigious stance spooked galleries around the world.

And so, for over 20 years, while Zanco painstakingly catalogued all the various pieces, Barragán's body of work was – basically – lost. Buried underground behind a very heavy and well-engineered Swiss door.

Which is where American conceptual artist Jill Magid enters the story. Hearing that Rolf Fehlbaum had bought Zanco the Barragán archive as an engagement present, in lieu of a ring – a story that Zanco has since debunked – Magid got the Barragán family's permission to exhume the artist's ashes and turn them into a literal diamond¹. And that's exactly what she did. (At the end of the day, we're really just walking-talking carbon.)

In 2016, Magid presented the compressed essence of Luis Barragán – a 2.02 carat rough-cut diamond with a single polished facet – to Zanco, basically offering her the artist's body in exchange for his body of work. Zanco was touched by the offer, but ultimately refused, deciding to hold onto the archive in Switzerland.

Thankfully, this whole weird, bureaucratic mess was resolved in May 2022, when the collection was officially, finally, opened to the public. Zanco had finished her lonely, secretive work, and Luis Barragán was released back into the world. You can visit the exhibition yourself next time you're in Weil am Rhein, Germany, just over the river from Basel.

And the diamond? As far as we know, Jill Magid still has it. The ring has been displayed in various exhibitions, including at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) in Mexico City. And (family differences aside) it's kind of nice to think of Barragán living on, not in some airless Guadalajara tomb, but out in the light, brilliant and unyielding – a little shard of eternity. Diamonds, like architects, are forever.

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¹Well, some of the family’s permission. In 2016, Barragán’s great-nephew, Tadeo Pintado Barragán Cervantes Omana, wrote a public letter condemning the exhumation and demanding Barragán be returned to his tomb. It was signed by various members of the family, who apparently had no idea about this whole performance-art diamond proposal thing.