Si quiere una casa bonita

We have been quite busy showing Auckland's highlights to Antonio. His conference at the University of Auckland about Luis Barragan was yesterday, and he had a quite full schedule all day. Afterwards we enjoyed a cocktail with good New Zealand wines and then dinner with Peggie Deamer (Head of School) and Ross Jenner (Deputy Head of School) and Julia Gatley (lecturer) at one of our favourite restaurants in Parnell. Of course the talk on the table was about Barragan and Mexican identity, and we had a quite interesting discussion/debate on the importance of the search of identity through design / architecture. I guess it's not a matter of critical regionalism (introspective) anymore, since it's becoming more a search of defining ourselves to the eyes of globalization (exospective). In that sense, Barragan could be a good example of "gazing" into the structures that influenced mexican architecture and "transforming" them into their basic (minimalistic) essence, thus becoming an universal language rather than a local dialect. The keynote of the conference was this quote: "To do architecture like I did, don't do as I did, see what I saw".

ciao