"Architecture is a art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being"
About this Quote
Barragan is smuggling a quiet revolution into a sentence that looks almost polite: architecture isn’t primarily a problem-solving discipline, it’s an emotional medium. The phrase “consciously or unconsciously” is the tell. He’s arguing that even when designers pretend they’re just arranging structure, budget, and code, they’re still composing mood. A building always “says” something; the only question is whether the architect admits authorship.
His grammar is famously imperfect in English, and that actually suits the message. “Architecture is a art” reads like a small refusal to be corrected by technocrats. The real precision is elsewhere: “aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere.” Not the facade, not the plan, not the Instagrammable detail - the air itself. Barragan treats space as a climate, something you inhabit with your nerves and breathing before you ever “understand” it. That’s why he pairs aesthetics with “well being,” a phrase that sidesteps both luxury and moralizing. He’s not selling beauty as status; he’s claiming it as psychic infrastructure.
Context matters. Working in mid-century Mexico, in an era that often worshipped International Style purity and machine efficiency, Barragan insisted on silence, shadow, saturated color, courtyards, water, thresholds - the slow, sensuous stuff modernism tried to edit out. The subtext is a rebuke: if your building is clever but makes people feel brittle, it has failed at being architecture-as-art. By making emotion the criterion, he re-centers the human body as the true client, and atmosphere as the lasting brief.
His grammar is famously imperfect in English, and that actually suits the message. “Architecture is a art” reads like a small refusal to be corrected by technocrats. The real precision is elsewhere: “aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere.” Not the facade, not the plan, not the Instagrammable detail - the air itself. Barragan treats space as a climate, something you inhabit with your nerves and breathing before you ever “understand” it. That’s why he pairs aesthetics with “well being,” a phrase that sidesteps both luxury and moralizing. He’s not selling beauty as status; he’s claiming it as psychic infrastructure.
Context matters. Working in mid-century Mexico, in an era that often worshipped International Style purity and machine efficiency, Barragan insisted on silence, shadow, saturated color, courtyards, water, thresholds - the slow, sensuous stuff modernism tried to edit out. The subtext is a rebuke: if your building is clever but makes people feel brittle, it has failed at being architecture-as-art. By making emotion the criterion, he re-centers the human body as the true client, and atmosphere as the lasting brief.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Luis
Add to List
