Luis Barragán House and Studio

From the street, the house that Luis Barragán built for himself in Tacubaya, in western Mexico City, gives almost nothing away: a tall, plain rendered wall the colour of its neighbours, a few small windows, two doors. That refusal is the point. Barragán, the Guadalajara-born architect who won the Pritzker Prize in 1980, turned the house inward, and it is the rooms, light and garden behind that blank front that made it, in 2004, the only private residence in Latin America on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Barragán moved in in 1948 and lived here until his death in 1988, altering the building constantly, so that it served as a laboratory for his ideas. The route through it is a deliberate sequence. A small, dim entrance with volcanic-stone flooring acts as a buffer against the street; it opens into a tall vestibule washed in yellow light, with one wall painted fuchsia; then, past a low threshold, comes the living room, double height under wooden beams, whose great window frames the garden. The garden itself was left to grow semi-wild behind high walls, and it looks larger than it is because it borrows the neighbours' trees. Upstairs, reached by stone stairs without railings, are the bedrooms, an "afternoon room" and the roof terrace.

The house explains why Barragán matters. He combined the massing and privacy of traditional Mexican building with the free-flowing space of modernism, and used colour, strong and deliberately unharmonious, as a building material. Rooms have different heights and floor levels, most spaces need no artificial light by day, and the rooms keep his original furniture and his collection of art, mostly Mexican from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, with pieces by Picasso, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Jesús Reyes Ferreira, the painter who shaped his sense of colour.

The house has been a museum since 1994, owned by the State of Jalisco and the Fundación de Arquitectura Tapatía Luis Barragán.

Getting there

The house is at General Francisco Ramírez 12–14, in the Miguel Hidalgo borough, about 2.6 km from Polanco. Mexico City International Airport (MEX) is about 13 km away.