La Jornada: They recover the functionalist imprint that Luis Barragán captured in housing complexes

The architect Luis Barragán (1902-1988) is known worldwide for his use of color, for creating the urbanization plan for the Jardines del Pedregal de San Ángel subdivision and for being co-author of the Torres de Satélite. However, before acquiring this fame, he had a functionalist period in which, having just arrived from his native Guadalajara in 1936, he designed several residential buildings in various areas of Mexico City.

One of them was for the brothers Froylán and Arturo Figueroa Uriza on the streets of James Sullivan and Miguel Schultz, in the San Rafael neighborhood. Now, its neighbor on the block, the El Eco Experimental Museum, has recovered the history of these homes designed in 1940 in the exhibition Figueroa Ensemble: Emotional Memoryamong whose documents, period plans and photographs, the original contract signed by Barragán stands out.

“We named it a group because it consists of a building with six apartments (Miguel Schultz 146) and two houses (Sullivan 55 and 57), all with commercial premises on the ground floor. It still belongs to the Froylán and Arturo families; a great-granddaughter even lives there. The exhibition allows us to talk, on the one hand, about Barragán, its history and this little-known period in its architecture, and, on the other, think about El Eco -created in 1953 as a penetrable sculpture –, its immediate surroundings, its neighbors with whom we share the street, the sidewalk, the neighborhood and many other things,” says Pablo Landa, director of the museum.

From this functionalist stage in Barragán’s architecture, which spans from 1936 until he built his own house in 1947, “we have identified at least 20 houses and buildings located in the Condesa, Hipódromo, Cuauhtémoc neighborhoods and this one in San Rafael. They are similar in that they are apartment buildings, almost all of them, with shops on the ground floor, which function very well. Although they precede his best-known period, there are elements that already announce it and, Furthermore, they speak of an architect with a vision of the city and the relationship between architecture and real estate development,” he points out.

These elements would be the “management of light”, since “they have large windows and corridors. Let’s say that there are almost layers of clarity. The light enters, for example, through a patio, then filters through a staircase and through an access corridor that reaches the room, like these chambers in which they are made like gradients of light.”

Then, many buildings from that era are in front of parks. The Figueroa Complex overlooks the Garden of Art. “Although they were compact buildings in very dense urban areas, I was looking for land that was in front of parks to relate them to these green areas and frame the views with the windows. These elements already speak of the landscaper Barragán who undertook the Pedregal project in the mid-1940s,” says the anthropologist, who specializes in architecture, archives and participatory processes.

The museum as part of the environment

Aside from Barragán, the exhibition takes into account the history of the building and its inhabitants: “we have found lists of the tenants, many of whom were immigrants recently arrived in Mexico City, including people related to culture, such as photographers, writers and journalists. These are buildings that were in the process of making modern Mexico.”

Since Landa took over the direction of El Eco two years ago, “we have worked to think of the museum as part of its environment. Hence, we have done different activities to document the history of the colony, such as a book about the Monument to the Mother. We have gotten very close to the neighbors and taken tours of the colony. By discovering this building, its history and the existence of all these documents, it seemed to us that it was opening a window to other topics that are relevant to the history of architecture in Mexico and the city.”

The Figueroa Complex is located on what were the land and railroad tracks of the old Colonia Station, demolished in 1939. “When the tracks were removed, the park and the street were made, and some land remained that the government sold to individuals,” Landa points out. For the person in charge of El Eco, the building that Barragán built for the Figueroas “continues to be a good model on how to build the city, because it combines apartments of an appropriate scale and a relationship with the sidewalk, the park and the shops. It offers many very pragmatic architectural lessons on how a city can be built.

“Another thing we want to rescue is the fact that it is from a family, not from a huge company. It is from people who live there, not from people who are far away. It is a way of making a friendly city, in which each building is a piece of a larger city idea.”

Figueroa Ensemble: Emotional Memory It is exhibited to this day in the Museo Experimental El Eco, at Sullivan 43, Colonia San Rafael.