Milton Barragán Dumet—a heralded Brutalist architect, sculptor, city planner, politician, and educator—passed away on August 7 in Quito, Ecuador. He was 90 years old. News of Barragán’s death was shared in an obituary by El Comercio.
The late designer’s buildings and artworks made of concrete, steel, and wood left an “indelible mark,” El Comercio said. Templo de la Patria is one of Barragán’s best known designs, among many others. Templo de la Patria was completed in 1975 at the base of Pichincha Volcano; its concrete girders support an epic mural by artists Oswaldo Guayasamín and Pavel Égüez.
“Milton Barragán’s housing is formally innovative while attentive to inhabitants and the city,” said Ana María León, a Harvard GSD professor. “I think [his residential buildings] are his strongest contribution, but I have a soft spot for Templo de la Patria, a sculptural monument carved into the slopes of the Pichincha Volcano to celebrate a mythical independence battle. The building literally bursts out of the ground like an explosion,” León told AN.
A Polymathic Life
Barragán was born in 1934 in Huigra, Ecuador, a small town about 100 miles south of Quito. He eventually studied architecture at Universidad Central del Ecuador. There, he cultivated his interdisciplinary interests in architecture, sculpture, ceramics, Picasso, Cubism, Félix Candela, Pier Luigi Nervi, Art Nouveau, and the Bauhaus. After graduating in 1958, he received a scholarship in 1959 to study land use planning in France.
In the 1950s, Quito was rapidly built up under the tutelage of Public Works Minister Sixto Durán Ballén, an architect who eventually became Ecuador’s President. Those years, Ecuadorian officials were preparing for the XI Conference of Pan-American Chancellors, which was set to take place in Quito in 1960. Important Brutalist buildings followed by Ballén, Alfredo León, and others including Palacio Legislativo (1960), which was much later renovated by Barragán in 2007.
In 1961, Barragán released Ecuador’s National Housing Plan. (That housing program placed special emphasis on rebuilding the parts of Ecuador badly damaged by the 1949 Ambato Earthquake, which killed over 5,000 people.) In 1962, Barragán cofounded the College of Architects of Ecuador (CAE), a school which later graduated many important designers.
This momentum chilled however after Presidents José María Velasco Ibarra and Carlos Julio Arosemena Monroy were ousted by a U.S.-backed military junta in 1963. The new right-wing government cracked down on democratic institutions, banned the Ecuadorian Communist Party, cut diplomatic ties with Cuba and the Eastern Bloc, and became a major U.S. trade partner.
Barragán left again for Europe not long after the 1963 coup. While in exile, Barragán visited buildings by Le Corbusier and Studio BBPR, a Milanese architecture office cofounded by Ernesto Nathan Rogers. He worked in France, Italy, and the Netherlands; and he studied social housing in Denmark.
A Lasting Legacy
With his feet firmly planted in Quito’s architecture community, and having studied in Europe, Barragán moved back to Ecuador and cofounded ARQUIN (Architects and Engineers Associated) together with Alfredo León, Oswaldo Viteri, and other important Ecuadorian architects.
Barragán completed Edificio Artigas in 1970, and Templo de la Patria was finished five years later. Templo Nacional de La Dolorosa (1978), CIESPAL (1979), and many other important works came next. In 1980, Barragán featured prominently in MoMA’s Architecture since 1945 Latin American Exhibition.
The next year, in 1981, Edificio Atrium debuted, a tapering concrete structure with an exposed exoskeleton. In 1988, the parliamentary chamber inside Palacio Legislativo, completed in 1960, was updated with a controversial “anti-CIA” mural painted by Oswaldo Guayasamín, the same artist behind Templo da la Patria’s fresco.
Between 1988 and 1992, Barragán worked in government as president of Ecuador’s House of Culture. There, Barragán passed important legislation that helped secure public funding for artists, which made him beloved even more. After his term ended, Barragán went back into private practice, and he moved his office into the Barranco residential and office complex he himself completed in 1993. He eventually returned to government work and served as a planning consultant for the city of Quito.
Barragán spent the next two years completing planning studies. He eventually taught at Italy’s Polytechnic of Milan and Spain’s University of Seville. Barragán led a massive renovation project in 2007 at Palacio Legislativo. “I play more than anything with space. Space that continues, that is guessed, that comes and goes from the work,” the late architect told a reporter for El Comercio in 2011.
“That is the beauty of sculpture and architecture,” Barragán continued. “They have three and four dimensions in which the viewer moves around the work and, when it allows it, passes through it. I leave the material visible with all its characteristics so that the viewer can see what the creative processes have been like. It is honesty with the material that sets me apart.”
