A Mexican architect and landscape architect, Luis Barragán (1902-1988) sought to reconcile traditional Mexican architecture with international modernism. Barragán has been termed a Surrealist, a Minimalist, and a Post-Modernist, yet his works are personal and evocative and often defy classification.

Luis Barragán was a 20th-century Mexican architect and landscape architect of vigorous and refined originality. He was born in 1902 in the state of Jalisco, where his family were builders by profession and also owned ranches. Growing up in Jalisco provided Barragán with a reserve of evocative regional images that would stay with him for the rest of his life and would appear with regularity in his designs.

Barragán was trained as an engineer and was entirely self-taught as an architect and landscape architect. This placed him outside the architectural mainstream and left him suspicious of architectural education, which...