Aqueous Place in the Architecture of Luis Barragán: Dark Pink and Surface-Other

Abstract

Staged here are two parallel accounts of visits to houses by Luis Barragán—Casa Ortega (1940–42), and Casa-Estudio Luis Barragán (1947–48)—both sitting side-by-side in the ‘uphill’ neighbourhood of Tacubaya within Ciudad de México. The accounts, initially conceived of as a means of ‘describing’ divergent visitation experiences by the authors to each other, have expanded asymmetrically here: one (“Dark Pink”), taking the form of a prose poem; the other (“surface-Other”), enacting a wandering narrative partly carried by impressions/recollections and partly by academically inclined trails. Both acknowledge and aim to work within the touristic window that occasioned the visits. Together they amount to a form of travel chronical (at once truncated and dilatated) in which visitation contextualises itself within echoes of other visitors, writers, and commentators. In concert, if not in harmony, the accounts aim to distill the appearance, the feel, the implications (aesthetically, culturally, socially, and politically) of an aqueous underpinning to Barragán’s work. This underpinning is acknowledged as being partly fictional and partly essential.