Material y memoria: transformaciones en la obra de Luis Barragán

Abstract

No son pocos los arquitectos que, tras abrazar la modernidad, encontraron su particular conversión desde la experiencia táctil y espiritual del material o, incluso, desde la evocación de su memoria y nostalgia. A todos ellos les llegó un momento en el que los tensos planos enfoscados en blanco les parecían de una excesiva abstracción y, sobre todo, distantes de otras realidades materiales por las que sentían una atracción más honda y permanente, y que activaban, simultáneamente, su memoria y las razones espirituales del construir. De hecho, en esa blanca abstracción no se mantuvieron ni sus creadores. Uno de los conversos de más largo recorrido es Barragán y las transformaciones en su obra son deudoras de los múltiples encuentros con los materiales y sus paisajes.

After a few early years working in the Guadalajara of his birth, Barragán seized a dream opportunity and relocated to Spain’s capital city in 1935. In Madrid he embarked on a productive and successful career, designing multi-dwelling units for private developers for 5 years. During that time, further to what he had learnt in his travels across Europe, Barragán saw in modern architecture a catalogue of precise postulates with a reproducible vocabulary. All the buildings he authored in that period indisputably drew from modernist precepts. Nonetheless, like other modern architects, including Le Corbusier himself, Barragán experienced the desolation of white abstraction, of inert and repetitive matter: precise and effective perhaps, but unable to engage with the spiritual values nesting in the deep recesses of the architect’s memory. Around 1940 Barragán decided to break with architectural practice. In so doing he redefined it beyond the stylistic limits that had been his reference until then. The source for that redefinition was the encounter with gardens as the material and object of design, along with the strong attraction exerted on the architect by that specific type of matter. The return to stone, wood or traditional rendering arose not only out of a need to evoke his own experience, but of a desire to conjure up in these materials the memory and nostalgia of other cultures. The El Pedregal gardens and adjacent Prieto House, built in 1945-1950, constituted a veritable laboratory where Barragán, deploying a materially dense architecture, spawned beauty by uniting landscape and aesthetic expression. In a word, the architect aspired to use matter to express humanity’s emotional link with nature, its ultimate haven. With his oeuvre, Barragán blurred the boundaries between technical and humanistic concerns, sensing in every element, every object, the spiritual reasons for building. As in the Capuchin Convent at Tlalpan (1952-1955) and the Gilardi House at Mexico City (19769, with that blurring matter also participates in continuity. Such continuity, converted in his architecture into spatial succession, elicits the feel of a close-knit, changing and uninterrupted sequence. The resulting sleekness is the origin of the joyful, still delight in a work that needs mouldable materials to create that effect. All that together associates memory with the experience of materials. Inherited matter contributes to the generation of timeless and universal architecture, which portrays it not portrayed as the opposite of the spirit but rather, paradoxically, as the vehicle for its expansion.