Luis Barragan House and Studio
The architect's own 1948 house and studio, a World Heritage Site visited by timed guided tour.
Luis Barragan built this house and adjoining studio for himself in 1948, in a modest street in the Ampliacion Daniel Garza district, and lived there until his death in 1988. Behind a plain grey concrete front the rooms unfold as a sequence of tall, top-lit volumes in which light, water, colour and rough plaster are handled with great economy. The house is kept as he left it, with his furniture, books, religious paintings and objects in place.
UNESCO inscribed the house on the World Heritage List in 2004, calling it a masterpiece of the modern movement that fuses traditional and vernacular elements with international currents; it remains the only individual property in Latin America given that distinction on its own. The building is owned jointly by the Government of Jalisco and the Fundacion de Arquitectura Tapatia Luis Barragan, which runs it as a museum with strictly limited visitor numbers to protect the interiors.
Highlights
- The living room's tall cruciform window overlooking the overgrown garden
- Cantilevered pine staircase rising without a handrail to the private library
- Roof terrace of coloured walls framing nothing but the sky
- Barragan's studio, furniture and personal collection left as he arranged them
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