Built in 1948 on 1,162 square metres of house and garden, this is the only single building in Latin America on the World Heritage List, inscribed in 2004 as, in UNESCO's words, a masterpiece of the modern movement that fuses traditional and vernacular elements with philosophical and artistic currents of every period. From the street it gives almost nothing away: a grey rendered wall, windows placed where rooms need them rather than where a facade would want them, garage doors, and a service entrance. The composition is entirely inward and upward — a sequence of tall rooms, a cantilevered stair without a handrail, a garden allowed to grow wild against the glass, and a roof terrace closed on all sides by free-standing planes of orange, pink and lilac so that nothing but sky is visible from within it. Barragán bought the land in the early 1940s in what was then a working-class district.
Barragán divided his archive in his will. The personal papers stayed in Mexico at this house, now a museum. The professional archive — tens of thousands of drawings, prints, models and files, together with the rights to his name and to photographs of his work — was bought in 1995 by Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of the Swiss furniture company Vitra, who gave it to his fiancée Federica Zanco; she directs the Barragan Foundation and the material has been held in Switzerland ever since. Repeated attempts to return it to Mexico have stalled. In 2016 the artist Jill Magid made "The Proposal": with the family's consent she had a portion of Barragán's ashes compressed into a two-carat diamond, set it in an engagement ring, and offered it to Zanco in exchange for the archive. The offer was not accepted and the archive remains in Switzerland.
Wikidata Q1046414 · Commons: File:Luis Barragan House exterior 02.jpg · Photo: Ymblanter · Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0