Anahuacalli Museum / Taller de Arquitectura - Mauricio Rocha (2024)

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Text description provided by the architects. Diego Rivera began the great dream of achieving the City of Arts in the South of Mexico City in a landscape of volcanic stone with native vegetation that emerges from it. In the 1940s, he began to imagine how to carry out his project in this place, inviting Juan O'Gorman and his daughter Ruth Rivera to collaborate. They envisioned buildings constructed with the same stone as the site and carried out the first exercises of murals on the ceilings with the colored stones that they later created at Ciudad Universitaria.

The Anahuacalli begins with a hard plaza with a sunken courtyard 45cm below the general surface, with buildings that form it with liberated corners. Diego Rivera begins the central building, which was his studio and where he housed his most important pre-Hispanic pieces, but during the construction of this building, barely on its second floor, Diego Rivera dies in 1957.

Juan O'Gorman and Ruth Rivera decide to continue the project, and in the 1960s they finish the central building and four more buildings that complete the central plaza. To the east, an administrative building, to the west, two buildings with an exhibition hall program and another as a library, and to the north, a warehouse for the 60,000 pre-Hispanic pieces not exhibited to the public.

The Anahuacalli Museum began offering community art and math workshops, and more exhibitions with certain limitations in its infrastructure, for this reason, they decided to hold an expansion competition to achieve this goal on the adjacent lands where the ecological reserve is located.

Our winning project of the competition builds new buildings in an open reading to the layout of the pre-existing buildings and achieves a new relationship with a soft plaza where a courtyard emerges that is one-fourth of the sunken courtyard of the hard plaza. The new buildings have the same level of floor and ceiling as the existing ones, leaving only the main building that was Diego Rivera's studio at a different height.

To the south is the visitor warehouse where the 60,000 pieces that were not previously exhibited are now housed but can be visited by the public. To the west is the workshop building with a large dance hall that also serves as a multipurpose room for conferences and concerts, open porches to an internal patio, and two rooms for visual and mathematical arts. To the north is the office building, and to the east, it is made up of the pre-existing buildings, achieving an expansion in the library.

These new buildings and the existing ones create a new public space with a central courtyard and liberated corners. By respecting the levels of the main plaza in the new buildings, the dock, and the courtyard become the articulators between constructed spaces, leaving a rugged topography of the volcanic landscape below, allowing for certain covered open spaces to achieve two new outdoor workshops. The pre-existing buildings take on a new program or expand it.

The buildings are recessed in their base to achieve a smaller impact on the landscape, the materiality of the new buildings with concrete slabs and volcanic stone in their base, walls, and machine-cut latticework that, starting from 30x15cm pieces with a height of 90cm, mounted and interwoven, achieve in their modulation an open latticework with openings that are regulated by the view of the landscape.

The old warehouse now becomes the maintenance area, construction of museography, and reception of works for exhibitions, the administrative area becomes a cafeteria, shop, and toy library, and the library increases in size.

The Anahuacalli Museum is a place that grants a large public space in addition to offering the last period of Diego Rivera and the collection of his pre-Hispanic pieces that he donated to the people of Mexico.

Achieving the extension involved an open dialogue with the architecture that they created with a contemporary interpretation and the great challenge of building in the ecological reserve, which is one of the few examples where its ecosystem has not been altered, with the least possible impact and that the intervention manages to be a link and not an aggressor.