The structure and museography for the final room in the temporary exhibition ‘Emissaries for Things Abandoned by Gods’, is conceived as a stepped wooden platform that pays homage to Barragán’s most iconic architectural tropes and gestures – from the famous floating stair to the religious iconography within the house. Altar shelf is a structure that jointly displays all the pieces of Barragán’s art and design collection in his studio space, pieces which are normally dispersed and placed, as the architect intended, throughout the house. Both light and solid, tectonic and temporary, the thought behind the piece was to give the viewer a complete and unobstructed overview of the architect’s personal and private collection, simultaneously. It is intended to showcase how a contemporary display system can exist within the geometrical library of Barragán, using tradition in a more permeable way to allow the visitors to inspect every face of his private collection.

The overwhelming majority of these works have never left their original location. As such our intention has been to create a setting that allows the viewer at all times, and from all angles, to appreciate the pieces from sides that have never been accessible to the public, providing a new reading of the work as a constellation, and allowing a further glimpse into the qualities of each individual work, discovering the notion of authentic vs. replica so prevalent in the way Barragán collected objects creating replicas of important artists that simply fit his desired size for a particular place in the house. Seeing the back of a colonial painting, or a fake Picasso or Modigliani, can be as informative and inspiring as the front, not dissimilar to the experience of visiting a natural history museum where pieces overlap, implying relationships and instigating historical threads, we can begin to better understand the mind of the architect through this museography.