250 words on chosen building

Luis Barragan House and Studio:

The chosen architecture is unique in so many ways and the one thing which catches my attention is Barragan's textures and colours used to create a building in his opinion which would let him escape the outside world, having the walls raised 1954, so that the world inside only opened up to the sky.

"The walls create silence" - Barragan.

In the living room is a view of the garden, with the cross of redemption left untouched compared to the view of the ever changing garden which has been left to it's own fate. It is reported that Barragan never touched the garden and that his idea was to allow the vegetation to grow naturally connecting the mystical interior to the garden.

Here there is also the idea of architectural regionalism as Barragan mixes the traditional architecture of Mexico to the new modern world. With trips to Europe and the country side of Mexico Barragan was able to intertwine the ideas to create a peice of architecture that would leave a mark on Mexico. With inspiration also from Spanish Colonial and the traditional colours of Mexican architecture.

Processes to visualise Barragan House:

With research at the library and on the internet it has been extremely difficult to find original sketches and monographs. However there have been re-developed floor plans and elevations. How I intend to visualise the house would be using either 3D studio Max or Google SketchUp. The main features which I want to concentrate on is to put myself in the shoes of Barragan and try to present this house. Concentrating on the main ideas of Colour, Shadows, Texture and possibly Nature.

In concentrating on these ideas and making this the theme, with the time allocated it would not be necessary to model the whole building but to highlight the idea of colours, texture etc.

Difficulties: find the right colour and sunlight involved and producing the texture, if nature is used things which i need to do research on would be how to make water look natural in the program used. It has been hard to aquire resources to model the house in scale so with reseach I hope to find a scaled plan of the house rather than having to work out everything from a plan with no scale - eg. re-printing the plans to scale 1:100 and compare the width of a bedroom opening (door - 900) to the length of the walls etc.

Opportunities: Much of his work in terms of just modelling is quite simple - mainly consisting of flat surfaces rather than curved ones. So much time would be saved in modelling and more time would be spent on things like rendering.