Author Description

The Barragn Guide presents architect Luis Barragn's constructed works to a larger public, providing keys to his creative evolution and his cultural context. Following the volume's itinerary through three Mexican cities--Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Monterrey--provides not only a chronological survey of Barragn's surviving work, but also an interesting experience of three urban realities that constitute the basis of his architectural practice and the context of the work of his followers. Born and raised in the provincial town of Guadalajara, Barragan performed his first experiments there before moving to the more open and fertile creative environment of the capital, where rapidly growing new neighborhoods provided a wealth of opportunities for an ambitious young architect. It was on the outskirts of Mexico City that Barragn's vision of a new way of living, at once modern and Mexican, took shape in the late 1940s, in the form of a sophisticated residential development known as Jardines del Pedregal. The project won international acclaim and Barragn moved on to create a series of masterpieces: his own house, the houses built for the Prieto Lopez and Galvez families, the monument known as Satellite Towers, and the outstanding residential developments of Las Arboledas and Los Clubes are but a few examples of his singular way of dealing with nature and architecture as two key elements of the intimate relation between inside and outside, between constructed and non-constructed environments.