Luis Barragan: Mexico's Modern Master.

By Antonio Riggen Martinez. Introduction by Francesco Dal Co and Juan Jose Lahuerta, New York: The Monacelli Press. 1997. [pounds]40

The famous buildings of the United States are of framed construction, and framed buildings tend towards openness and lightness. Cross the Southern border into Mexico and different values prevail, the wall is important and so is enclosure.

Luis Barragan is the master of the architecture of the wall. We are all familiar with those magic pictures of horses, water and colourful walls, but we know little of the actual buildings and even less about Barragan as a person. Emilio Ambasz's The Architecture of Luis Barragan published by New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1976, tells us little about the man and was, in any case, published before his late works were built. The new book fills in the gaps, we have the story of the man as well as of his buildings, and the man himself comes across as immensely likeable, politically committed, deeply religious, over-sensitive and never quite in with the establishment.

A generation younger, Ricardo Legorreta has learnt much from the older man. He has learnt about walls, about colour and about the importance of landscape. His colours are even more powerful, if the sense of form is not quite so unerring. Mutlow's book is a celebration of Legorreta's success, with beautiful photos by the architect's daughter. Barragan's life was a series of unfulfilled hopes and of disappointments, Legorreta's is a story of almost too much success, with spectacular sites and even more spectacular budgets.

From England, with its Arts and Crafts tradition and the value placed on materials, these buildings seem an impossibility. It is as if they are built out of cheese. Picture after picture of walls of great beauty, with never a coping, an airbrick, a drip mould, a flashing, a dpc or anything that might mar a purity so perfect that you could frame a photo of the Gilardi House and hang it on the wall as a work of abstract art. Of course all that sunshine helps, but don't they get rain too? I could not help a guilty sense of reassurance to note, from the recent photos of the early Barragan buildings, that they are very stained and weathering badly. But the images of the buildings in their prime remain among the most evocative architecture of our century.

JOHN WINTER