It’s our first day, and our tickets for Barragán’s house are for 30 minute slots this afternoon. I pull out my laptop in the Uber to continue reading about the architect we’re studying. We are reading “Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital” by Kathryn O’Rourke which is incredibly well-written. In it, our main architect is coming off as a bit of a mixed bag. 

“As a young man he was neither steeped in the rhetoric of revolutionary social reform nor trained in the National School of Fine Arts, and instead studied to be an engineer in Guadalajara. For twenty months he lived in Europe, before he ever spent significant time in Mexico City. A devout Catholic in an era of cultural anticlericalism and reform, he made no apologies for his faith or his social views. He was the architect primarily of houses for the rich, and became wealthy himself through real estate development while nearly all the other protagonists of twentieth-century Mexican architecture depended for their livelihoods on major public commissions that served public health, housing, education needs, or the expanding federal bureaucracy.”

To summarize, he’s an outsider to the Mexican architectural establishment, both in potentially quite interesting ways that make him stand out as an individual and other ways that might make him stand out as someone with Eurocentric and potentially less than ideal icon of mexican values. He trained as an engineer, and he learned about architecture in Europe. In some ways I’m thinking he was just his own guy. He was a deeply spiritual man, so of course he would have kept a distance from the secular machine being built to serve the masses. In some ways, though, I wonder whether we’ve been gearing up to study a very successful sell-out. 

We’ll never know what his intentions were because he refused to talk about them, and either way, the Uber has arrived. We are greeted by a remarkably curated group. Its hard to describe, but every carefully assembled outfit perfectly fits to the carefully maintained posture of its wearer. For the first time we notice how unusual it feels to encounter ourselves. 

Seems like we’re not being let in until the second hand hits 16:00. While we wait, one of the guests begins to rave about our architect, specifically, how he was featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times. We laugh. If it ever was his intention to assemble the most diligent readers of international style magazines, he certainly succeeded. When we applied for this fellowship, we wanted to study a Mexican architect. Barragán appeared at the top of every search list.

With all this internationalism, we’re starting to wonder, is he really our guy?