Last September, in Guadalajara, an American conceptual artist named Jill Magid and a pair of gravediggers convened at the Rotonda de los Jaliscienses Ilustres, a monument where the most celebrated citizens of the state of Jalisco are entombed. With them were two notaries and a handful of bureaucrats. It was just after eight in the morning, and the area was nearly silent. The quiet was disturbed by the sound of chisels striking stone. The gravediggers removed a metal plaque, then a cement wall, and, finally, a brick façade. More than an hour later, they hit what they were looking for: an oxidized copper urn, filled with the ashes of Luis Barragán, one of Mexico’s greatest architects, who died in 1988. They removed the urn from the cavity, brushing off dust and ants. Then they opened the vessel and presented it to Magid, who scooped out half a kilo of what looked like dirt and transferred it to a plastic bag, which she then put into a box. The next day, with the box in her carry-on, she flew home to New York.

In April, a diamond—2.02 carats, rough-cut, with one polished facet—arrived in Manhattan. It was sent overnight from Switzerland, and Magid had been tracking its shipping status hourly online. The package was delivered to her husband’s office, and after work he took it to Brooklyn, where they live with their two young sons. Magid did not open the small black box containing the jewel for hours, and, when she finally did, she cried. “It was way more emotional than I expected,” she told me.

Mined diamonds are typically between one and three billion years old, but this one had been created in six months from Barragán’s ashes by a company that specializes in compressing cremated human remains so that they can be worn as jewelry. The diamond sat in a fireproof safe in Magid’s apartment for the next two weeks. At the end of the month, she flew with it to Guadalajara, Barragán’s home town. She hadn’t slept the night before she left, and she kept rummaging through her purse like a person convinced that she’s lost her passport. She laughed at herself as she did so. “I just need to make sure he’s still in there,” she said.

Barragán, who won the Pritzker Prize in 1980, is revered for his geometric, brightly colored buildings, all of them in Mexico, which blend vernacular hacienda elements with modernist influences from Europe and America. The architect Louis Kahn called him “completely remarkable” and praised the home that Barragán designed for himself in Mexico City as “not merely a house but House itself.” But, since his death, Barragán has slipped from view, largely because of an odd arrangement concerning his archive and his copyrights. Since 1995, when both were purchased by a Swiss manufacturing family, the archive has been held in a bunker in Basel. Researchers have been denied access, and even the use of images of Barragán’s buildings is carefully controlled. Among those who study twentieth-century architecture, the inaccessibility of Barragán’s archive and the bizarre conditions of its custodianship have become almost as much of a preoccupation as his buildings.

Magid, whose art addresses issues of institutional power and the law, first heard about the archive four years ago. An elaborate plan began to form in her mind, an extended performance-art work in which all elements of the story—the architecture, the archive, those fighting over it, and Barragán himself—could be crystallized into a single gesture. “How,” Magid wondered, “does one insert oneself into a dead man’s life?”

It was jacaranda season in Guadalajara, and the streets were carpeted with purple blossoms. Magid headed to a grand, lemon-colored house in the city center, one of Barragán’s early buildings, which is now home to a Catholic university. It was late morning, and Magid had arranged to introduce Barragán’s family to their carbonized relative. A banquet table had been set up in the back garden. Fountains gurgled; parrots squawked; dogs barked on the other side of courtyard walls.

People began trickling into the garden. A man with a video camera circled. (A film unit, co-created by Laura Poitras, has commissioned Magid to make a documentary series about the Barragán project.) A little after noon, an elderly man with a Freud-style beard entered through a back gate. In one hand, he gripped a wooden cane carved to look like a horse; the other clasped the arm of his young granddaughter. It was Hugo Barragán, the architect’s nephew. Magid embraced him, and beckoned the group to the table. Hugo sat directly across from Magid, his head shaded by a mesh baseball cap that was held aloft by a servant.

Magid took the box out of her purse and placed it on the table. She opened the lid and the sun hit the stone. Everyone gasped. Hugo peered at the diamond, as a nephew took a photograph on his phone. His granddaughter, tears in her eyes, took the diamond from the box and placed it in Hugo’s shrivelled hand. Magid explained that the diamond would be set in an engagement ring the next day.

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Magid had contacted the family in 2014, inviting them to an extravagant dinner prepared by chefs who had once cooked for Barragán himself, in order to ask for their permission to exhume the ashes. Both the family and Magid were familiar with a widely circulated story—that the archive had been bought by a Swiss businessman as an engagement gift, in lieu of a ring, for his wife, Federica Zanco. Magid explained that her intention was to use the engagement ring with Barragán’s compressed remains to “propose” to Zanco, in the hope that she would, in exchange, agree to open the archive, perhaps even to return it to Mexico. The family members took a vote and agreed unanimously. “They became conceptual artists,” Magid recalled. “Here they were debating the tiny details of how the ring could go on tour, how long it could stay in Mexico, how I would propose. It was amazing.”

Luis Ramiro Barragán Morfín was born in 1902, into a wealthy, conservative family. He grew up between Guadalajara and a ranch thirty miles away. One of nine siblings, Barragán was an avid equestrian and a precocious aesthete. He once told a journalist that as a schoolboy, while out riding, he would notice “the play of shadows on the walls, how the afternoon sun gradually got weaker—although it was still light—and how the look of things changed, angles got smaller and straight lines stood out even more.” Photographs show Barragán as a boy, in tennis whites, posing in automobiles and airplanes.

He studied engineering and then travelled around Europe, admiring buildings and attending design fairs. After returning to Mexico, he got his first architectural commission and practiced in Guadalajara for almost a decade. In 1936, he moved to Mexico City, where he designed his most iconic works.

Barragán was a devout Catholic, and his work is characterized by a mixture of opulence and abnegation. “Where do you find more eroticism than in the cloister of a convent?” he once asked. His buildings are mostly residential, with anonymous perimeter walls that protect modestly sized but lavish interiors. Louis Kahn recalled that, in the sixties, he asked Barragán to help him design the courtyard garden at the Salk Institute and flew him out to San Diego to see the site. Barragán took one look at the expanse of concrete and said, “You are going to hate me, but there should be no tree here,” and went home, forsaking a commission from one of his most famous living colleagues.