Luis Barragán: His Library

A photography book about one room: the library of Luis Barragán, inside the Mexico City house he built for himself, now the Casa Luis Barragán museum. The buildings are famous for their color and their silence. This book finds both at the scale of a shelf. Barragán read constantly and lived among what he read; the chairs pulled up to the books, the marked-up pages, the busts and glass spheres set in front of the spines are all evidence of a man who noticed everything and kept what he noticed close.

The book is built on pairings. Across facing pages, a hand-annotated page sits opposite a stair rising into a plane of pink light. A marbled endpaper answers a magenta corridor. A row of worn spines meets a wooden door. The compositions do what Barragán's architecture does: hold color, light and stillness in a single frame, and make you look again.

The cover gives none of this away, which is exactly how the house works. From the street, Casa Barragán is a blank grey wall; the color begins once you're inside. The book is clothbound in natural linen, his signature stamped across the front, large enough to need both hands, and every bit of pink is on the inside.

Luis Barragán (1902–88) was born in Guadalajara and lived and worked primarily in Mexico City. An architect and engineer, he joined the principles of Modernism to traditional Mexican architecture and received the Pritzker Prize in 1980. Casa Luis Barragán is considered one of his most important buildings.

Part of our Design Books and Gifts for Graphic Designers and Architects collections.