Conceptual artist Jill Magid’s compelling and contemplative film The Proposal, which opens at New York’s IFC Center on Friday, May 24, is an atypical architecture documentary. Magid gives viewers glimpses of Luis Barragán, Mexico’s most important architect, at work, in the world, at leisure. We learn about his life from friends and relatives. We spend time with some of his colorful buildings, like Cuadra San Cristóbal (1968) in Atizapán and the Satellite Towers (1958) in Mexico City. Barragán haunts every frame, but this is more a document of Magid grappling with his legacy and who controls it rather than tracking the sweep of his career.
After the Pritzker-winning “poet among architects” died in 1988, his personal and professional archives were split. The former is at the Luis Barragán House and Studio, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Tacubaya. The latter, however, was purchased in 1995 for $2.5 million by Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of the Swiss furniture company Vitra, in lieu of an engagement ring for his now-wife, Federica Zanco. Since then, it has been housed below Vitra’s headquarters in Birsfelden. Zanco promised that within two years the archive would be publicly available. Nearly 25 years later, it’s still nearly totally inaccessible.
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