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| Casa Möbius garden In the 1970s the hills of San Jerónimo on the outskirts of Mexico City Gallardo brought to life his concrete home on Calle Pino. |
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| The concrete fireplace is in keeping with the architecture In the living room, which features the residence's gridded ceiling and concrete fireplace, furnishings are paired with paintings, photos and a number of contemporary designs. And ceiling pattern is omnipresent in the house, like an architectural signature, swooping overhead wherever one goes; its cave-like aesthetic creates a subterranean environment. |
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| Ernesto Gallardo’s study room A bell jar sits on the study table. Inside it, a crucifix and a gilded metal rose. Around it are piles of sketches, poems, blueprints, cartoons and letters. The shelves beyond creak under the weight of encyclopedias, stories by Jorge Luis Borges and decades old issues of National Geographic, their spines faded to pale yellow. The computer in the corner is decades old; Gallardo preferred to sketch by hand and rarely turned to digital help. |
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| Maquettes and furniture Hanging from a double-height space is a gridded leather piece on hemp rope by Leonor Antunes. The workshop is replete with paint, tools and scraps of wood. A wooden chair with a swooped leather seat by the late furniture and interiors designer Clara Porset. |
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| HemisFair 68 table The single-legged HemisFair 68, one of the many pieces in the house designed by Gallardo himself, along with the wooden bookshelves and sofas. He crosses the parquet floor, as the afternoon sun floods through the ceiling-high windows, and grabs a weighty brass model of an altar. |
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| The wooden sofas in the living room A photograph of Mexico City's Plaza Las Tres Culturas from the 1960s taken by Armando Salas Portugal – who captured much of Mexican architect Luis Barragán's work. The roof rises up and doubles back in on itself in a puzzling structure that gives the house a labyrinthine quality. Its underside features triangular hollows – which reduces the quantity of concrete without detracting from its structural integrity. |
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| House or spaceship? The labyrinthine San Jerónimo home of Gallardo is a treasure trove of the polymath’s many designs. Gallardo was fascinated by mathematics, which becomes apparent when standing on the roof of the house. Its shape is a simplified version of the Möbius strip (a geometrical form discovered by German mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius in 1858) and resembles an infinity loop. |
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