“Casa Gilardi: A Surreal Journey through Architectural Contrasts & Human Values”

This book chapter / essay presents work by Alvin Huang and appears in GILARDI House — Barragán’s Last Witness.

Author: Alvin Huang
Publication: GILARDI House — Barragán’s Last Witness
Editor: José Luis Álvarez Tinajero
Publisher: ACTAR
Year: 2023
Type: Book chapter / essay

Abstract

This essay reads Luis Barragán’s Casa Gilardi through the poetry and cultural criticism of Octavio Paz. It describes the house as a surreal, introverted world shaped by carefully staged oppositions—light and darkness, compression and expansion, saturated color and white surfaces, enclosure and release. Through a limited palette of elemental forms and materials, Barragán creates an architecture of introspection that challenges Western modernist ideals and expresses architecture as a crystallization of Mexican identity and human values.

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