ARCHITECTURAL CRITICISM ESSAY

HOUSE-LUIS BARRAGAN STUDIO

HERNANDEZ RODRIGUEZ ELIZABETH

UNAM FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, MEXICO DF.
THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE IV

This critical essay is based on Luis Barragán's Casa Estudio, in which important
themes are exposed in the form, function, materials, spaces, routes, which make this
house so special.

It is located at numbers 12 and 14 of General Francisco Ramírez Street, Daniel

Garza neighborhood in Mexico City, former Tacubaya neighborhood, built in 1947.
Being a popular neighborhood, made up of modest small-scale houses, and the
traditional typology of collective popular housing: the neighborhood. Taking as
context, the proximity of the trade workshops, shops, etc.
The façade, facing south west, is aligned with the street, presented as a massive
border of dosed openings, with an austere, almost unfinished expression, integrating
into the context, respecting the appearance of the identity of the place,
NEIGHBORHOOD.
The reticular and translucent window of the library is projected on the plane of the
façade. The exterior retains the natural color and roughness of the flattened
concrete.
The door to the north marked with the number 12, functioned during Luis Barragán's
life as the Architecture Workshop. It is distinguished by the profile of the façade that
has a lower volume.
And through number 14, you access the Architect's house.
The strong feeling of limit that the facing establishes towards General Francisco
Ramírez Street.
This space is a type of emotional and sensory filter, where you disconnect from the
outside world, it is the goal. It functions as a waiting place, using materials such as
wood and volcanic stone.
The second door separates the golden gloom, with intense light from the goal,
towards the deep pink walls of the lobby.
A faint pink shadow appears on the white of the staircase, being the essential color,
where the reflections and shadows of the color palette used by the architect return.
The spatial generators, in scale and complexity, from which they rotate and cohere
with the rest of the spaces.
The west façade of the house is distinguished from the practically impenetrable
border of the façade towards the street not only by its proportion of openings, but
also by its house-garden dialogue.
It is the plane to another spatiality, the vegetal one, being for the architect something
of the most important, taking up the gardens of Ferdinand Bac.
The room is furnished with chairs, armchairs, solid wood tables, and the lectern,
using materials such as solid wood, leather, fibers, vegetables, and wool.
And with the collaboration of designer Clara Porset, most of the furniture is
reworked, also knowing that the chairs are alien to any idea of mass production.
This being a clear example of the reuse of furniture, this way we can explain the form
of sustainability in architecture, not exactly solar panels or green walls, but an
architecture using all resources such as light, integration into the context, etc.
The architect throughout his stay in the house changed the design of the spaces
depending on the use, but this can only be done by an architect who lived it and had
the economic potential to make the changes since to make them you need to live in
the house. space.
The room where the library is located has a double height, the unity is preserved and
underlined by the flight of beam lines that cover it and by the same bookcase that is
housed on its sides, linking all the spaces of the room.
Integrating into the context, but adopting an emotional architecture, in the interior
space one perceives the serenity and tranquility that the architect desired. Leaving
the view and external noise excluded.
In contrast, it frames the garden, a closed grid of opaque glass that receives only
filtered light from the street and some shadows from the trees.
At number 12 is the entrance to the Workshop, which stands out for its wooden
ceiling, illuminated by a window facing east.
Expressing the most indispensable thing of Landscape Architecture: the vegetation
and the strong and dramatic expression, is the Patio de Ollas, whose characteristic
is vines on the walls, dark water, and a pink door in contrast with the vegetation.
The guest bedroom facing the street has its monastic spirit as a common
denominator, not only because of the economy of resources with which they are
resolved, but even because of the selection of furniture and the textures selected for
the rugs and bedspreads.
On the second floor, the view of the garden is reserved for the architect's room and
the afternoon room or the “white room”. It is accessed through a new spatial valve,
now yellow, that concentrates the morning light coming from the hall.
The Christ Room is a place that shares the same fluid and complex spatiality with
the lobby. Its program may be ambivalent, but its function within the spatial
sequence leaves no room for doubt as it is the preamble and the announcement of
the meeting with the terrace open to the sky, with the outcome and climax of the
ascension that began in the goal. .
The terrace is built with walls raised above the roof level by the white tower that
houses the water tank and the stairs that lead to the service area on the third and
last floor.
Thus being the clear application of the fifth façade, with appropriate use, and
excluding everything exterior. So that the space regains its value.

MESOGRAPHY
http://www.arquitectronica.com.mx/arquitectos-recidos/luis-barragan-morfin.html
http://www.omnibiography.com/bios/Luis_Barragan/index.htm
http://artepedrodacruz.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/la-obra-de-luis-barragan-1902-
1988-arquitecto-de-la-luz-y-el-color-2/
http://www.casaluisbarragan.org/luisbarragan.html

CONCLUSIONS AND SELF-EVALUATION

I chose Luis Barragán's Studio House because it is an Architectural Work that, at
least for me; It is not easy to understand his spaces, and as he described it, he
wanted his architecture to be emotional. And that is what is perceived.
With this topic of the critique essay it was easier for me to interpret a space, you
begin to structure the ideas and they agree with what the architect perceived when
designing. The difficult thing was starting.