Water in Barragán’s houses has no fixed color of its own — it shows the pool’s own tone, the sky, the surrounding walls and the depth of the basin all at once. In Casa Gilardi the pool sits directly beside the red focal wall and the blue flanking planes, doubling both colors in a softer, less stable form and destabilizing where one plane ends and its reflection begins.
Because the surface is always a mixture, a single hex can only stand in for one moment: light here is the sunlit, reflective reading; shadow is the darker tone of the basin’s depth where reflection gives way to the water’s own color.