Luis Barragán was 24 in 1925 when he traveled to Paris to attend the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. He returned to Guadalajara raving not about the emerging avant-garde movements on the European architectural scene, but rather about a pair of books published that year. : “Jardins Enchantés” and “Les Colombières” by French landscape architect Ferdinand Bac . Arranged around fountains, pergolas and perfectly framed views, Bac’s romantic gardens were, as he wrote, “places of repose and peaceful pleasure.” According to Tapatío architecture scholar Juan Palomar, these books "represent a synthesis of the Mediterranean—of the European coast and North Africa—that reminded Barragán of his own local architecture ." The open terraces of the Côte d'Azur , the shaded medinas of Morocco , the dark passages of the Alhambra that open onto reflecting pools... all had analogues in the farms of Luis Barragán's childhood , in the whitewashed adobe houses of rural Jalisco, and in the drama of the region's Augustinian convents . In the following decades, while many architects in Mexico City preferred the sharp geometry of early modernism, Barragán and his cohort filled Guadalajara's new neighborhoods with Mediterranean villas and Ferdinand Bac -inspired gardens , embellished with chrome or terrazzo flourishes. Their focus , says scholar Juan Palomar , “it was an architecture that could come closer to the times without breaking with tradition .” The legacy of the Tapatío School
These ideals have been central to Guadalajara's architectural tradition since the 1920s , when the four founders of the so - called Tapatío School ( “Tapatío” is the Mexican term for the people of Guadalajara) - Luis Barragán Morfín, Ignacio Díaz Morales , Pedro Castellanos Lambley and Rafael Urzúa Arias - graduated from the city's Escuela Libre de Ingenieros (Free School of Engineers). At the time, the largely conservative and Catholic city of merchants, traders and regional bureaucrats had, since its founding in the 16th century, avoided the excesses of the wealthiest cities. Even the handful of grand neoclassical monuments , erected throughout the 19th century, that dominate its historic center seem out of scale with the modest , low-rise urban landscape that surrounds them. Drawing inspiration from the farmhouses and convents of the surrounding countryside , they covered the walls with thick layers of plaster and arranged their interiors around cloistered gardens . As architecture in Guadalajara began to look more modern in the 1950s and 1960s (the forms reduced to abstract cubes; banks of windows protected by brise-soleils), the heirs of the Tapatío School often used inscrutable facades to conceal winding passages and quiet corners for contemplation—buildings that appealed to both a growing city and its devout population. As architect Alejandro Guerrero , one of the city's most prominent contemporary practitioners: "Even modernism in Guadalajara was never completely modern." (Anthony Cotsifas/CASACOR)
The heirs of the Tapatío School, now entering their fifth generation, seem to use memory as their raw material , treating atmosphere and experience as no less essential than form and structure . Although less religious than their predecessors, they still they gesture toward the sublime at every turn of the corner and encourage introspection at every blind facade. If many contemporary buildings cling to technology as a compelling force , drawing our attention to the future, the heirs take a more thoughtful approach to progress, offering places to retreat , question and think . The architects of Guadalajara, whether building with brick , stucco or steel, continue to "recreate and renew nostalgia, making it contemporary" , as Luis Barragán once urged. The Aranguren House
The best example may be the 1937 Aranguren House , designed by Pedro Castellanos and recently renovated by architects Francisco Gutierrez and Luis Aldrete . Castellanos covered the facade with sensitive stucco , now painted roan , transforming what Gutierrez describes as “flirtations with modernity ” —an Art Deco frieze, a pair of Bauhaus -inflected windows—faces the gardens, as if to shield the neighbors’ conservative sensibilities . (Anthony Cotsifas/CASACOR)
Gutierrez and Aldrete’s renovation is appropriately understated . As you make your way through the 1012 square meter lot, the sound of bubbling water guides you through a procession of white rooms , in which the architects have etched delicate lines into the plaster. . Arriving at Aldrete's studio, a tiered limestone fountain finally reveals itself through a half-moon archway. In a second courtyard in the back, Gutierrez and Aldrete covered an outdoor walkway connecting the main house to the former servants' quarters. with a hardtop hood made of glass and painted steel. (Anthony Cotsifas/CASACOR)
Inside, a rounded threshold marks the spot where they broke through the roof to open a staircase between the second and third floors. When the sun drops behind the clouds, its light spills in through a ribbon window in the east wall of the hallway. , and the simple geometries of door frames and staircases flatten into two dimensions. The Padilla House
(Anthony Cotsifas/CASACOR)
Straight ahead, a staircase wrapped in pink-red quarry stone disappears midway up its rise behind another wall. Without a clear destination, the steps become an abstraction , more sculptural than architectural . Beside the staircase, and in a corner, another door opens onto a dark hall - a shock of darkness - leading to a short , labyrinthine corridor that ends, suddenly, on a wide covered terrace . (Anthony Cotsifas/CASACOR)
Designed in 1989 by architect Hugo Gonzalez , now 63—who is revered in the Guadalajara design community but little known outside of it—the 8,000-square-foot Padilla House is not just a structure , but a narrative never quite legible in its totality. If the fragile glass jewel boxes of high modernism and concrete bunkers of brutalism embrace radical transparency , then Casa Padilla is rooted , as one of Guadalajara's most iconic buildings, in an older liturgical logic of mystery and admiration . “With Hugo, everything revolves around shadows and discovery ,” says landscaper Carlos A. Mora , 37, Gonzalez’s son-in-law and the unofficial administrator of his legacy. Ortiz's house
By the 1980s, the work of many Tapatío School practitioners had stagnated , dominated by “a kind of religious and mystical love of Barragán,” says architect Sergio Ortiz . Luis Barragán had spent years in Mexico City cultivating his persona as a poet of light, shadow and color, leaving aside his first regionalist work. In 1986, two years before Barragán's death, Ortiz joined the faculty of the Western Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESO). Frustrated with what he saw as a “dead and petrified” regionalism, Ortiz incorporated philosophy, poetry, and contemporary art into a classical curriculum of architectural theory and practice. (Anthony Cotsifas/CASACOR)
Since then, Ortiz’s home , built in 1992 in Colonia Seattle —a cobblestone suburb popular with the city’s intellectual elite —and his private studio , completed in 2008 , have become lodestars for a new generation of Tapatío architects. The 3,300-square-foot house—a floating prism of flat white surfaces punctured by square and semicircular windows —feels like a habitable abstraction . (Anthony Cotsifas/CASACOR)
The new generation in Guadalajara
The newest generation of Tapatío architects—most in their 30s , many of them former students of Ortiz and Aldrete, Guerrero and Gutierrez, Macías and Peredo—have grown up in a city that is more cosmopolitan than their predecessors. Guadalajara's cultural scene is thriving , with galleries, restaurants, artists' studios and design shops hidden behind unattractive facades or opening onto tree-lined streets in the same colonies where Castellanos and Barragán built their first homes. Designers and makers who, even today, 15 years, they may have settled in the capital or abroad, they returned home to collaborate with artisans in the region. The city's recalcitrant conservatism began to relax , although its intimate and slow lifestyle remained intact. (Anthony Cotsifas/CASACOR)
Tradition still has its place here , of course, but so does the subtle irreverence that these contemporary architects have introduced. Consider, for example, the RC1 House , designed in 2018 for a family of five in the leafy suburb of Rancho Contento by architect Saúl Figueroa. , 35. The community’s building guidelines call for angular roofs with terra-cotta tiles, empty gestures toward conventional forms that Figueroa both respects and subverts. Guadalajara continues to expand into clusters of gated communities and fortified suburbs— yet another legacy of Luis Barragán , whose projects around Mexico City helped introduce American-style suburbia to his country. Developments like these sacrifice the sense of place that defines the best Tapatío architecture in favor of privacy and security, the new ideals of a country dominated by violence and distrust. Previous generations of architects grew up in constant contact with the landmarks left by their ancestors; young practitioners “grew up in a city made of walls ,” says Miguel Valverde Hernández, who is a partner with Daniel Villanueva Sandoval in the firm V Taller. (Anthony Cotsifas/CASACOR)
Building something new in Guadalajara today requires not just recreating and renewing nostalgia, as Barragán suggested , but reconsidering what exactly is worth being nostalgic about. “We take on our heritage and it becomes a set of questions ,” Peredo says. “How do you takes these ideas of poetics and domesticity to different scales? How do you make something so powerful with so little ?” In other words, how do you bring enchantment back into everyday life? It’s nostalgia not as a guiding principle , but as a question , a frontier that generates an idea , a starting point - or, perhaps, a wall to be overcome one day. Source: NYTimes 
