“A beautiful garden,” Luis Barragán remarked in his Pritzker Prize acceptance speech, delivered in English by a surrogate on June 3, 1980, “is the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life.” On February 11, 2025, seeking an efficient haven from the bitter New York cold and a relentless barrage of bad news (including the proclamation, two days earlier, of our nation’s first-ever Gulf of America Day), I visited the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx—right across the street from Donald Trump’s almost mater—to see its twenty-second annual orchid show, titled Mexican Modernism and inspired by Barragán’s “bold, multicolored designs.”
The garden paths were icy, but inside the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, beneath this Paxtonian pleasure dome’s sixty-foot glass vault, an irrepressibly kitschy display of faux-stucco arches and freestanding walls painted electric pink, purple, and orange paid slaphappy homage to Mexico’s diamondized master of modern architecture. Apart from Martirene Alcántara’s photographs of the architect’s textured geometry, on view in the auxiliary Ross Gallery, there is little here to remind his many fans of serene walled gardens and posh suburban compounds. Instead, we are placed within a tropical snow globe strewn with orchidaceous confetti, a cumbia-soundtracked, piñata-colored pageant of touristic, picturesque “Mexico.”
Here we find Barragán’s restrained colorism punched up, the typical Pedregal pink passed over for the aberrant fuchsia of his Casa Gilard (1977). A rounded portal, a Hispanicizing rarity in his oeuvre, supplements clean lines and right angles softened by rollicking flora. In a TikToky take on the famous pool at Cuadra San Cristóbal (1968), a water feature sprouts from an allover tableau of phalaenopsis (the common “moth orchid” sold at my local bodega). The flowers are bouncy and luscious, more variegated up close than how they will inevitably appear on social media, as a bloomcore step-and-repeat. In addition to orchid species (1,300 of which are found in Mexico), cacti and succulents artfully nestled in the tableau further inspire dreams of exotic oasis while catering to millennial gringo tastes.
It’s too easy to color-match Casa Gilardi, plunk down a jacaranda, and expect petals of Barragán’s flowering genius to fall from the sky. Matter of fact, I suspect that the mock jacaranda at NYBG, painted, on a magical realist whim, bright lapis—more Casa Azul than Gilardi—would have had the spiritual, nature-venerating architect turning in his grave. To quote again from his Pritzker speech: “There is no fuller expression of vulgarity than a vulgar garden.”
With due respect to the maestro, I beg to disagree. Case in point, the morning before I visited Mexican Modernism, Google Maps users woke to discover that, overnight, the blue mass signifying the Gulf of Mexico had become the Gulf of America.