“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 archi…