Keith L. Eggener’s recent book, Luis Barragán’s Gardens of El Pedregal, published by Princeton Architectural Press, is a welcome in-depth study of the urban design, landscape, and architecture of Barragán’s 1,250 acre Gardens of El Pedregal residential subdivision, sited in the El Pedregal lava fields in the southern part of Mexico City. This well-researched book provides much-needed critical commentary on this elusive project, which is now mostly destroyed and is primarily known to us through the evocative photographs of Armando Salas Portugal.

Luis Barragán is probably Mexico’s best-known architect and landscape architect of the twentieth century and is the subject of numerous books and articles in periodicals. However, while previous survey publications have explored the lyrical and poetic aspects of Barragán’s work, other, more tangible, issues have been largely unexplored. Eggener makes an important contribution to the scholarship on the architect by focusing on a single project and by exploring topics as varied as: Barragán’s design and construction methodology; the business of architecture and speculative land development; the geology, archaeology, and social history of El Pedregal; national identity; modernity; Surrealism; photography and the construction of architectural images; advertising; and fashion. Eggener supports his assertions with thorough research, using original archival sources in Europe and the Americas that have not been previously utilized by other scholars.

Marc Treib’s well-written foreward to the book looks at Barragán’s career and places him in the larger discussion of modernism in Latin America. Eggener’s introduction examines the elusiveness of El Pedregal in the context of Barragán’s career. The project, begun in 1945, has long been viewed as a work of art as well as the seminal work in defining Barragán’s mature work, yet it was also a commercial venture with an extensive print and media campaign. According to Eggener, the aim of his book is “to take stock of Pedregal’s physical setting and its built forms (particularly as these existed during Barragán’s period of involvement there), to question its many dualities—the merging of the historical and the contemporary, the foreign and the native, the mystical and the mercantile, an advertising campaign that emphasized security and stable value occurring simultaneously beside a critical discourse based on poetry, dreams, memory, and other such frangible concepts—and to consider how and why these came together when and where they did” (2).

In the section entitled “Built Architecture,” the reader is oriented to El Pedregal in terms of its geology, mythos, and flora and fauna, and to the site’s larger relationship with the urban design of Mexico City. El Pedregal’s picturesque street design—which distinctly differs from the grid organization of traditional Mexican urban fabric—is discussed, as are the issues surrounding the making of a Mexican suburb, which unlike its Anglo American counterparts, includes private, walled gardens.

Although numerous aerial maps and several plans drawn by Barragán and his collaborators are provided, certain changes and additions to the graphic documentation would be helpful to the reader. The location of the “dream-like, surreal” photographs included in the book could be keyed onto the site plans. It would also be useful if the plans were all presented at the same scale. This would aid in understanding the description of the site, its growth over time, and its urban context. Interesting comparisons regarding scale and organization with suburban developments discussed in the text, such as Levittown, NY (1947–51) and Baldwin Hills Village, CA. (1937), could be made by the reader if their designs were also presented at the same scale. More plans and analytical drawings indicating where Barragán made adjustments during construction after photographs were taken, as discussed in the text , would be enlightening, as would additional plans and sections of individual houses. In a project so related to the topography of the site, several sections through the site and of individual gardens and public spaces would also be extremely helpful.

The section entitled “Photographic Architecture” discusses the integral relationship of photography to Barragán’s work in terms of its conception, modification during construction, and its representation and reception by others in commercial real-estate advertising, as well as in professional journals and academic books. Although Barragán’s work has been understood and represented by Armando Salas Portugal’s photographs, the “construction” of these photographs has not been scrutinized.

According to Eggener, Salas Portugal was commissioned by Barragán to compose two types of photographs. “Objective” photos—broad views of landscape and building in different atmospheric conditions—were to be used as aids for studying compositional issues, lighting effects, and for making changes in ongoing construction. Salas Portugal’s “abstract” images—austere, black-and-white photographs carefully framed at close range—were, as Eggener says, “filled with tension [and] proved [to be] the perfect complement to Barragán’s abstract, minimalist architecture”; a “landscape of memory,” they offer a recollection of Mexico’s silent, still ruins and vernacular architecture (91). In fact, these abstract views are the way that Barragán’s work, and in particular, his work at El Pedregal, has been passed down to generations of students, design professionals, and scholars.

In this chapter, Eggener also provides a much-needed discussion of Barragán’s work in relation to contemporary developments in art and architecture in Mexico and around the world, especially to the Surrealist movement and fashion photography. (Ironically, from my own direct experience with significant works of architecture, the built work of only three or four twentieth-century architects exceeds the photography of their works—including Carlo Scarpa, Louis Kahn, and Barragán. Perhaps not surprisingly, I also find the same is true for many works of vernacular and pre-Columbian architecture in Mexico designed by anonymous builders and architects.)

Eggener’s third section, “The Cultural Landscape,” is the most skillfully written part of the book and should be widely read by individuals interested in the relationship of the issues of place, local culture, and the making of works of art, architecture, and landscape. The author investigates the slippery issue of national identity and mexicanidad (“Mexicanness”), and one of the major questions in discussions of Latin American culture since the early nineteenth century: the dichotomy of the local and the universal. He provides an intellectual and cultural context for Barragán’s work, too often described elsewhere as the work of unaffected, “individual genius.” Eggener also comments on El Pedregal’s relationship to the mythic, nationalist, and modern aspirations of post-Revolutionary culture in Mexico in the 1940s, as well as the design of the campus of the nearby University City (for the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). He notes that El Pedregal was more related to its own specific place as a natural setting, while University City had more national and Latin American aspirations. There is an excellent discussion of the interpretation of El Pedregal in the 1930s and 1940s by painters such as Joaquín Clausell and Dr. Atl, who was an important influence on the architect as well as an entire generation of Mexican cultural figures. Eggener explores Barragán’s relationship to other modern architects such as Richard Neutra and provides new scholarship and insight on Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence on Barragán. Eggener presents surprising and unexpected advertising material for El Pedregal, which features images of Wright’s “Falling Water” (Kauffman Residence, Bear Run, PA) of 1936.

The section “Afterward: The Landscape of Fortune” concludes the book with an examination of how El Pedregal was received in the 1940s by the public and cultural critics both in Mexico and internationally. The retrospective of Barragán’s work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1976, which began a flurry of publications on the architect that continues into the present, is also discussed.

A helpful appendix at the back of the book features little-published lectures given by Barragán himself (who was generally reluctant to analyze and discuss his own work) as well as a checklist of major buildings, gardens, and public spaces designed by other individual architects at El Pedregal. The bibliography and footnotes are comprehensive and will undoubtedly be a useful starting point for future scholars exploring related studies. Princeton Architectural Press has done their usual fine job in terms of the graphic design and production of this book. The quality of the photographs is high; the images have been carefully gleaned from obscure archival sources.

Given the breadth of issues explored, this book will be useful to a wide audience in the humanities and social sciences, as well as to architects, planners, landscape architects, urban designers, artists, photographers, and art and architectural historians. Eggener’s Luis Barragán’s Gardens of El Pedregal sheds much light on Barragán’s built work, his working methods, and the architectural and cultural milieu of the 1940s in Mexico City. This book should find a welcome place in libraries of individuals and institutions interested in the arts and material culture of the Americas.