Luis Barragán · 1948 · Mexico City
Silence, colour and light made habitable
Built in 1948 as the architect's own home and studio in Mexico City, Casa Luis Barragán is the clearest built statement of Barragán's "emotional architecture" — a search for beauty, serenity and repose rather than functionalist display. Behind a deliberately plain grey street wall lies a sequence of rooms and a walled garden orchestrated around light: tall shuttered windows, monastic volumes, and planes of pink, ochre and violet drawn from Mexican vernacular and rendered timeless.
The house distils Barragán's influences — Mediterranean vernacular, Mexican convents, the gardens of Islamic Spain — into something entirely personal, where a shaft of sunlight on a coloured wall becomes the true subject. In 2004 it became the only individual house in Latin America inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it remains a place of pilgrimage for architects the world over.