On one of my trips to Mexico, I had the opportunity to meet him and his son in person during an interview I conducted at his office in Mexico City for the journal Arquitectura (Arquitectura COAM 311, 3rd quarter 1997, p. 59), about the unusual Managua Cathedral (1993), in connection with a predoctoral research project. Later on, as with any architect of international renown, it was easy to keep track of him and his work.
To point out that Legorreta was a different architect from Barragán is to state the obvious, but failing to acknowledge Barragán’s presence in his trajectory is simply a matter of being uninformed. No one can remain indifferent to the evident, if superficial, similarity in their use of materials and colour. The mutual awareness between the two was more than coincidental. Legorreta’s explicit acknowledgements of Barragán—such as Ricardo Legorreta’s 1989 text “Tribute” for Progressive Architecture, later published in Spanish in the Gustavo Gili book Barragán (ref. below)—are well known. They even appear in the major monographs on Legorreta’s work published with his approval and involvement, as in the following text:
“They met in person when the sculptor Mathias Goeritz introduced them at the inauguration ceremony of Automex. Legorreta had just received the commission to project the Camino Real in Mexico City and invited Barragán to act as landscape consultant for the project. They remained close friends until Barragán’s death in 1988.
Through his mother, Legorreta met Jesús ‘Chuco’ Reyes, a highly sensitive ‘primitive’ painter and sculptor and a close friend of Barragán, who was also a strong influence on Legorreta. The philosophies of these two men ran in parallel and reinforced his search for a Mexican architecture …/…”
[Wayne Attoe, Sydney H. Brisker, The Architecture of Ricardo Legorreta. Noriega Editores, Mexico City, 1993.]
If we consider program, tradition, and scale, we encounter a singular figure whose work contains exceptional hybrids, in my view marked by both strengths and shortcomings. Among his truly interesting works are the Hotel Camino Real (Mexico City, 1967), the interior of the IBM Technical Center (Mexico City, 1977), and the Renault factory (Gómez Palacio, Durango, 1984). In these projects one can see some of his basic influences: tradition (references to the vernacular and to Hispanic architecture are constant throughout his work), the manipulation of light (lattices, shadows, and backlighting form a brilliantly controlled repertoire in many of his projects), and the presence of walls (the shadows cast by the walls of the Renault factory, or the typical windows with their projecting cubic frames, would become another recurring feature).
There are many other contributions derived from geometry and from the incorporation of modernity into this sought-after tradition—an approach that, when transferred to different scales or contexts, did not always produce equally successful results. In any case, his work stands as a brilliant and singular reference within Mexican architecture that generated its own school.
Other publications:
- Exhibition catalogue — Legorreta Arquitectos. Ministerio de Fomento, Madrid, 1998.
- Photographs of the architecture of Luis Barragán by Armando Salas Portugal — Barragán. Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 1992.
