Luis Barragán qualified as a civil engineer in Guadalajara in 1923 and, because his school stopped issuing architecture diplomas, signed his work for the rest of his life as engineer, architect or landscape architect by turns. Travel in France and Spain in 1925–26 gave him Ferdinand Bac's enclosed gardens and the Alhambra; a functionalist decade in Mexico City after 1936 gave him a living. The mature work begins in the 1940s with land he bought and developed himself — the Pedregal subdivision, his own house on Calzada Madereros, later the Los Clubes estates — and it is made of walls, water, colour and controlled light rather than of structure. He received the Pritzker Prize in 1980 and died in Mexico City in 1988.
