115 MEXICO CITY TOP OF THE YEAR
Ranked number one in The New York Times’ Places To Go list for 2016. The capital could clinch the title with only Jumex and Soumaya museums, the neo-cubist Vasconcelos library or its dynamic creative scene. Or simply, as Luis Barrag‡n would put it, for its light and colour
POLANCO AND ART From the Museum of Anthropology to the latest, Mexico City’s tradition of outstanding museums constantly renovates itself. To ensure visibility, the latest choice fell on the slick and extravagantly expensive Polanco district, bristling with luxury stores and restaurants. The new-born Plaza Carso was commissioned by Carlo Slim, the Mexican tycoon listed among the richest people in the world. In this new urban development in Polanco, the Jumex Museum and the Soumaya Museum compete for tourist attention, offering diametrically opposite interpretations of art venues. Glittering, ambitious, almost arrogant, the Soumaya embodies opulence of form and material just as forcefully as David Chipperfield’s Jumex displays understatement. The Soumaya’s eccentric curves recall an enormous hourglass covered in aluminium tiles, like a snug coat of snake skin. Inside, it exhibits works of art ranging from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, including an ample section devoted to the Rodin era. Housed in a smooth block of travertine, the Jumex museum is deliberately terse and austere, except for the ‘jagged’ roof, an architectural device lending the edifice a touch of irony. Oriented downwards instead, the Telcel – the subterranean theatre whose conspicuous roofing was designed by Madrid studio Ensamble – stages Broadway shows.
MUST-SEE BUILDINGS The Chopo University Museum is an interlocking puzzle of lightness and upward momentum, an edifice that, over time, has found an ally. In order to create new spaces for students, architect Enrique Norten placed a suspended gallery inside the glass and cast-iron pavilion – built in 1902 to celebrate the Dusseldorf Art and Fabrics Fair, then moved to Mexico City between 1903 and 1905. Enrique Norten, founder of is a ‘cross-border’ architect living and working between Mexico and the US. «Although I started working in Mexico in the eighties, I don’t feel I belong to that ‘heroic’ moment of Mexican architecture associated with Brutalist works of the sixties, which continued to embody the Country’s power for over twenty years. Today there’s a whole generation of architects focusing on urban design, on public spaces, on community relations. Architecture in Mexico City is more integrated: it no longer looks at a building as an object, but at the relationship between the edifice and its context». As does the Vasconcelos Library, a work of cubist symmetry completed in 2007 by architect Alberto Kalach, surrounded by the luxuriant vegetation of the botanical garden accessible as a reading space. An interesting case is that of Michel Rojkind: not a starchitect, but a rockstar. Over ten years ago, Rojkind decided to leave a successful career as a drummer for a more uncertain one as an architect, and managed in just a few years to obtain important commissions. Mercado Roma is a three-floor food hall, a labyrinth of stands where you can enjoy a pork belly canapé or a duck sashimi along with tapas of Mexican cheeses. And, like a drum roll, Rojkind imparted the final oomph to this ultra-chic food market by introducing curtain walls of metal, vertical gardens, and back-lit staircases, transforming food shopping into
Ten Arquitectos,