The Plaza Carso Building
Fernando Romero (Born 1971) · 2011
From the street the museum looks like nothing else in Mexico City: a shining, twisting tower with no windows, narrower at the waist than at the top, covered from base to roof in thousands of silver hexagons that catch the light differently at every hour. It was designed by the Mexican architect Fernando Romero and opened in 2011 as the new home of the collection of Carlos Slim, one of the wealthiest people in the world, and it is named after his late wife Soumaya Domit. The building sits in Plaza Carso, a development of offices, shops and apartments in the Polanco district, and it has become a landmark of the city in a very short time.
Look at the skin. Around sixteen thousand aluminium tiles, each a hexagon, are fixed to a curved steel frame made of twenty eight columns and seven rings, and the whole structure was engineered with the help of the firm that worked on Frank Gehry's buildings. The tiles do not touch, so the surface breathes and the pattern seems to ripple. Inside, the plan is a spiral. You can take the lift to the top floor and walk down a ramp that winds around the walls, in the manner of the Guggenheim in New York, passing through six exhibition floors. The top gallery is lit from above by a roof that seems to float on slender columns, and it holds the Rodin sculptures.
The building matters because it announced a new kind of private museum in Latin America, free to everyone, open every day, and holding a collection of some sixty six thousand works ranging from old masters to Mexican modernism. Critics have argued about the architecture and about the collection, but the crowds that come are undeniable. A memorable detail is the way the building has no straight walls at all; every surface inside curves, and the works are hung on white partitions that stand free of the outer shell.
Did You Know? The museum is free to enter and open every day of the year, which is rare for a museum anywhere in the world.
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