This article was originally published in Domus 611 / November 1980
Seclusion and Serenity
Gilardi House in Mexico City: the most recent of Luis Barragán's works, whose success was now recognized with the International Pritzker Architecture Prize, the Nobel prize of architecture, created by Hyatt Foundation.
Luis Barragán, one of the great names in architecture, has produced very little, but that little is inimitably and exclusively his. Tall, polite, cool, but with eyes flashing deepfelt passion. The house he lives in, designed by himself, is both rigorous and complex in its articulation of spaces: it emanates a deep, almost religious, sense of absorbed concentration. Barragán, as always, does not talk about his work. He prefers to leave theory to the theoreticians and exegesis to the exegetists.
His aim, and achievement, is simply a "beautiful house"