Casa Luis Barragán

Pritzker-winning architect's house — colour, light, and silence

Address General Francisco Ramírez 12 y 14, Daniel Garza

The Mexico City home of Luis Barragán, the only Mexican architect to win the Pritzker Prize, is preserved exactly as he left it. From the street, it appears as a plain grey façade in a quiet residential block; inside, the building unfolds into a sequence of double-height living rooms, small lemon-yellow stairwells, and a famously serene rooftop terrace painted pink, ochre, and lilac.

Tours are by reservation only, in small groups, lasting about an hour. They run several times a day, in Spanish or English, and book up weeks in advance. The house was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004 — one of very few private residences ever to receive the listing.

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A story
Barragán lived alone in this house from its completion in 1948 until his death in 1988 — a private space he used to develop the colour-and-volume language that defined his public projects. He preferred the rooftop, where pink, ochre, and lilac walls box in a thin rectangle of sky.