I have to go to work tomorrow so I will try to get something down and perhaps refine it later if I may. Thanks for the question maro.
A garden has horticulture as its main guide and whatever happens there designwise is constrained by the elements that effect the way plants grow. What I am calling the 'built landscape' has a different set of constraints and other opportunities. Luis Barragan shifts his architectural forms, that are influenced by Braque and Mondrian, to the outside full of harsh Mexican sunlight and creates magic. How? by manipulating colour and shadow (some of the shadows in maro's pictures are painted on). How? by observing the way colours work and using this to advantage. How? by making water work.
You should read his acceptance speech for that prize.

I would have to differ in opinion in some of Tony's/Ink's replies. I wouldn't define gardens quite so narrowly, as I think a built landscape and a garden overlap greatly, and are more of a continuum than opposites. I also don't think that color was manipulated in the way that Tony implies, his walls are all solid, vivid colors in my view, and it is the shadows and changing light conditions that give the illusion of different colors. I also think that Barragan was bridging indoors with outdoors by taking architectural planes and materials out into the landscape, and bringing the outdoors inside by relating private courtyards and partially screened vistas of landscape into the interiors with cutouts in walls and window massing. The interplay of the two, along with brilliant use of color and contrasts of color, and how they bounce light back into the house are all key to Barragan's work. He also was brilliant in contrasting different planes with different materials to make utilitarian elements such as stairs into sculptural pieces. The severity of these planes as they intersect, the often minimalist use of trees and plantings to play off the architecture, and the introduction of the human element such as collections of pottery all help to humanize the often severe designs and make they liveable.

I feel that Barragan was very much on point with the idea of beauty as reason enough to design both buildings and landscapes, although I am not so sure that spirituality in the religious sense is a key component, and certainly don't consider it an element in my own work. Barragan's work also incorporates traditional elements of Spanish design and materials as it was expressed in Mexico and built upon it, rather than rejecting it or substituting foreign materials. Most all of his work is very site specific as well, and was designed in response to the details of that particular site, or the client's specific program requirements.

Thanks for referencing the web site on the Barragan Foundation and the speech, I hadn't been aware of them. As I was searching for the book on Barragan that I am sure is somewhere in my library, but couldn't find, I was sure that Barragan had done some work outside Mexico, but find only one reference to a courtyard at the Salk Institute in San Diego, and references to work in Monterrey and Guadalajara, as well as most of his work in Mexico City. His classic masterpiece works in Pedregal remain the ones most vivid in my memory.

In terms of what can be abstracted from Barragan's work and applied in one's own garden, surely it would include trying to abstract the essence of your own site, and play this off the architecture of the house, marrying the house and garden with enclosed architectural devices such as walls and screens, and remembering the sky as well, which is not shown as clearly in the photos of the web site referenced, but does show up well in some of the photo books on his work I have seen. Only a few of his projects had extensive plantings, and even these also always still had strong architectural bones.

...so glad you clarified about the color/shading, bahia. I would have been SO unbelievably disappointed to think that the nuance of color and shading was caused by other than the beauty of natural light on the geometric forms. I hope that we have misunderstood ink's comment.

Here's a link that sheds some light on Barragan's influences and body of work.

Here is a link that might be useful: Biographical Info

Ink, to yours to come I look forward. Looked up Braque, know Mondrian, very interesting connection. Still trying to PICTURE "A garden has horticulture as its main guide and whatever happens there designwise is constrained by the elements that effect the way plants grow. What I am calling the 'built landscape' has a different set of constraints and other opportunities."
I can see that this is so, but how are they not integrated?

Sammie, what you said, pretty much. (Do you think, though, that the horses and figures are superimposed (fake)??)

Bahia, thank you for your extended response; very enlightening, every word.

Sorry - have to leave for awhile, must get back to this later, it is SO interesting.

Maro

"I feel that Barragan was very much on point with the idea of beauty as reason enough to design both buildings and landscapes . . ." Andrew also often says (while beating his head against the wall) that beauty is a function as much as usefulness.

Bahia, I really appreciate your answer on how one could incorporate some of this in ones own garden. "Play off the architecture of the house" and "abstract the essence of your own site" seems too sophisticated for my ordinary ranch style house, but in my back yard space I can think about what you said.

Im thinking that if I did put in something inspired by what I have learned here, no one would recognize it as such. But it would be there because of what I learned here.

Here are two more photos, just because they are so beautiful.

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Another style:

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Here is a list of books at Amazon. Which one or two of these, or any others, would (anyone) recommend, just for a book to have? Our county library didn't have a single Barragán book, but probably the Seattle Library does.

Barragan - The Complete Works -- by Paul Rispa (Editor), Raul Rispa $31.50

The Life and Work of Luis Barragán -- by Jose Maria Buendia Julbez, Juan Palomar $31.50

Luis Barragan -- by Rene Burri $10.37

Luis Barragan by Antonio Riggen Martinez $119.97 (I doubt if I would go this far.)

Luis Barragan : The Quiet Revolution by Federica Zanco $47.25

Barragan : Photographs of the Architecture of Luis Barragan by Armando Salas Portugal $75.00
Thanks, everyone. Tony, did you get this far?
Maro

A few years ago we had an extended visit with friends in Mexico. They had arranged for us to stay several days at another home of their friends so that I could live in and experience a Barragan design. It is important, when studying Mexican design to understand that the cities are not safe. Homes in affluent areas are surrounded by tall walls, sometimes topped by razor wire. Flat roof construction, often three stories high, is where guard dogs silently watch every motion below, ready to attack. So, the high walls around which Barragan designed had a purpose.

Often, in my daily mediation, I walk through the Barragan house in which we stayed. The entire house was a garden. Except for the private bedroom areas, all the dividing walls between rooms were large, square glass boxes open at the top to the outside, heavily planted with tropicals. The whole house was a square box surrounding a very large patio garden. One had to cross the patio to reach many of the rooms. Furnishings were very sparse and placed in a manner which encouraged viewing of all the glassed gardens and patio which had just one magnificant, twisted tree arching from a corner casting a shadow on an intricate, subtle tile floor pattern. There is a reason that I was asked not to photograph the house interior which I respected. However, this house and its design still haunts me. So clean. So simple and yet so complicated.

Nandina,
We should all be so lucky to have such friends who can make things happen! From your description of the house, i think I can determine which home you stayed in... While I admire Barragan's style and minimalist use of plantings, I can never seem to pare down my own designs to such a level of purity, even a small city garden will have over a 100 species of plants...

I also wouldn't say that tall walls are necessarily all about crime prevention, they are also deeply ingrained cultural design manifestations of the arabic/moor/spanish/portuguese design for exterior spaces as they relate to the house, and also draw upon persian and roman house design, relating to the paradise garden and shelter from the wilds/desert beyond. In a humid climate with out strong breezes, they do not make as much sense, but they are a very useful design technique in dense urban areas here along the west coast, and can make outdoor spaces warm and inviting by trapping heat, blocking chill winds off the ocean, and providing privacy as well as protection. Of course, I would love to live in a climate where walls could be porous to the outdoors, but that is not the climate I enjoy here in the SF Bay Area.

The tree! I can see what you described.

Did this experience inspire any of your designs? Or part of any? It would be so interesting to hear about it.

Maro

Barragan's architecture and landscape cannot be separated - the garden and built landscape are one and the same, conceived to work together to create a particular world of haunting beauty. Talk about mood in the landscape! So I see how one would think of the work of Braque and Mondrian yes, but much more I see the influence of the surrealists like Giorgio de Chirico in particular and also Frieda Kahlo. Both artists (and I think Barragan as well) had a particular genius in making us see the "strange and mythic" that underlies everyday reality. Barragan's exaggerated conditions of light and shade (and yes, I believe that in certain cases shadows were "heightened" by use of different tones of pigment) evoke the melancholic piazzas of de Chirico's work; the use of water as a spiritual almost baptismal element is an evocation of his particular Catholic faith; the saturated colors and use of stark architectural plants offer a hyper-heightened magical take on vernacular and native materials.

I think part of what intrugues me about Barragan's work is that 99.99% of us (maybe more) do not live in spaces that were designed as a whole (landscape, garden, home). Nor do we design our spaces to express any sort of strong emotional content. So we try to create our "magical reality" out of a catch-as-catch can patchwork of decorating, renovating and planting, usually placing practicality and comfort somewhere higher on our list of priorities than being intrigued and unsettled by beauty. Then we wonder why we feel something is missing.

Or maybe that's just me.

Barragn's work makes me think "Zen" more strongly than any Asian garden ever has. Peaceful, beautiful, a place to contemplate the activity of the sun and sky and reflection of water against the walls. And I like his interiors even more than his exteriors--I think because of the solidity, simplicity, and tactile qualities.

A few comments to the comments on my post...

Maro, our Mexican trip was taken after we retired. I no longer have any desire to landscape as a business. But I still love the creative part, often stopping at interesting houses under construction and making quick sketches of landscape ideas for my own amusement. The tingle of deep design involvement, the working of ying and yang, feeling the pulse of a design as I play with light, shadows, texture and other feelings not easily translated into words, will forever excite me.

I agree, bahia, on your remarks about high walls surrounding dwellings. However, our archeologist son points out that in the early days man surrounded himself with walls to protect his family, food crops and to prevent sewage from spilling into the family compound. There were, of course, many reasons for walls, much dependent on climate and location. In some respects I would rather live with your abundant, overplanted, ever changing palette of color. It allows me to be casual, not afraid to change the position of a chair or garden ornament. The minimalist approach generally allows no additional room for change. The design is right there in your face, always perfect, always complete saying, "admire me".

Accordian, you have brought up a point to be stressed. It is very important to design interior, exterior and landscaping as one package. We talk about this every once in awhile on the Forum. Most home buyers locate a house too late in the building process to have this happen. Sadly they are faced with many of the landscape problems we see posted daily here. Yes, there will always be "something missing" in these developer aberrations.

If I had to guess, and it's really just a guess, I'd say that Barragan's use of color references bougainvillea. Wouldn't it be a lovely tie-in with the world outside his houses? Are the walls pink or coral, or whatever, on the outsides too, or only on the inner surfaces?

On another topic, what do you do if you've chosen to live in a modernist masterpiece (because you love it) but you secretly crave whimsy or abundance? Can it be incorporated in geometric beds and around the edges? I'm thinking that this happened in some of Barragan's buildings, but I haven't seen it documented in any of the photos I've seen--I'm not so much interested in the traditional buildings, but only the modernist ones. An example of a similar scenario is John Lautner's "Goldstein House" in LA--I think it works, but I'm not sure. Anyway, the architecture is vastly different.

Just in, a shower, count the money, a beer, I had to scroll down through some dross to get to this interesting thread. Call me pedantic but we are still attempting a bullet proof definition of 'garden'. Perhaps I scewered it, or maybe maro did by referring to something I said elsewhere. I saw another thread here that seemed to be asking what we want to see out the window, even if it is stuck on the window. The contributions to this have been something like what I expected from intelligent folk connected with landscape design and it is refreshing. If you want to buy a book buy "Guide Barragan" isbn 968-5208-18-2 which offers a tour of the mans work and an attempt at explaining his philosophy. I find it fascinating that he does not restrict his interest or involvement with the so called environment which dissolves the otherwise strict lines drawn between what is garden and what is art or what is nature or what is.
Ann your "The tingle of deep design involvement, the working of ying and yang, feeling the pulse of a design as I play with light, shadows, texture and other feelings not easily translated into words, will forever excite me." is on the money and Dick expresses the same about his music I am sure.
Tired now. Nice talking.

". . . he does not restrict his interest or involvement with the so called environment which dissolves the otherwise strict lines drawn between what is garden and what is art or what is nature or what is."

Can you rewrite this in eighth grade English so I can understand it? Use a couple of commas.

Can you rewrite your question in normal polite English, use a couple of words that don't offend me.

Please rephrase your statement.

I read back over my original statement and I can see where the confusion is because I seem to be saying the opposite to what I mean.
We have a tendency to compartmentalize, calling one part of the world around us house and another part garden, we pigeon hole art, literature and music and this helps us feel secure. Words like the environment, nature and space are often seen as being separate from one another. The material that we see as belonging in one pigeon hole we also see as out of place in another. What this means in particular to garden design is that, if we see a garden as a distinct space that contains only plants and house interior as another space that contains only furniture, we are restricting ourselves and our imagination. An extreme case of this compartmentalizing is the kind of foundation planting that is common all over North America and Canada, that is limited by what you are supposed to plant in that area.
When someone like Martha Schwartz uses bagels in a design she is challenging this tendency.
I donÕt think Luis Barragan put the various aspects of his experience of the world into boxes and so the divisions between art and nature or coloured wall and sky are not apparent. I don't see in his work anything that can be strictly called one thing or another which has helped me move away from a few self imposed constraints. Of course Barragan had the luxury of designing the whole and not just the part and he also worked with painters and sculptors etc.

Thank you.

Hence my question about how one can incorporate some of this concept in one's own garden, which bahia answered above, and I understand his answer, but the question remains for MY own garden, because of the fact that my garden is what it is and my house is what it is already.

Still, this whole thread has me looking at things differently. There is space left for something like a little spot of space and color. That might be another thread.

Thanks for the book recommendation.

Also, thanks for explaining what the Bagel Garden does. I now have an inkling of why things like that are done.

Maro

In the introduction, written by Pierluigi Nicolin, to a book called "Dictionary of today's landscape designers, he suggests that the last Big Thing was the revolution that turned away from the methods and tasted of European tradition. Interestingly he offers Barragan, Marx and Noguchi as the main players and says that the connection might be art, specifically avant gardes art.
The "European tradition" was also know as Beaux arts which was being taught in LA schools when another trio Rose, Kiley and Eckbo challenged it although I don't think they made a claim to art.
Both sets of three got rid of the straight jacket imposed by axis, symmetry and ornamentation or its own sake.