Luis Barragán's archive was sold in 1995 and kept closed in Switzerland, and an artist made a diamond from his ashes to trade for it

Barragán won the Pritzker Prize in 1980 and died in Mexico City on 22 November 1988. His house and studio became a museum co-owned by the State of Jalisco and a private foundation, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004. His office dissolved in the early 1990s, and in 1995 his professional archive was sold. Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of the furniture maker Vitra, bought it, reportedly as a gift for his then fiancée, Federica Zanco, along with rights to Barragán's name^†. The Barragan Foundation, founded in 1996 in Birsfelden, Switzerland, with Zanco as director, holds it. For about 20 years the archive was closed to the public and stored beneath Vitra's headquarters. The American artist Jill Magid, with the Barragán family's permission, had a small amount of his cremated remains made into a diamond and set in a gold ring. She offered the ring to Zanco in exchange for returning the archive to Mexico. The work was shown at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen and the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016, and in the documentary "The Proposal", which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018. Zanco had not accepted when the film was made. In 2022 the archive moved to premises in Weil am Rhein, Germany, managed by the Vitra Design Museum. It has not returned to Mexico.