District: Nuevo Polanco
Architect: David Chipperfield with TAAU / Oscar Rodriguez
Build: 2009-13
Floor area: 2,500 m2
All photos: Simon Menges © David Chipperfield Architects
TAAU was founded in 2004, and is an architecture and urbanism practice and consultancy focused on design and the design development of projects of diverse scales in Mexico and abroad. The firm has won various awards and has ongoing projects in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Queretaro, ranging from housing and urban design to public and cultural buildings.
Since its foundation in 1985, David Chipperfield Architects has developed a diverse international body of work including cultural, residential, commercial, leisure and civic projects as well as masterplanning exercises.
It has won more than 100 international awards and citations for design excellence, including the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2007 (for the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, Germany), and the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award, and the Deutscher Architekturpreis in 2011 (both for the Neues Museum in Berlin).
Practices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai contribute to DCA’s wide range of projects and typologies.
Museo Jumex houses the most important contemporary art collection in Latin America. Amassed by Eugenio López, wealthy heir to a soft drink fortune, the collection was originally housed on site at the company factory in the gritty outskirts of Mexico City. There is nothing remotely gritty about the new Jumex however. Clad in creamy Jalapa travertine and crowned by a saw-tooth roof that allows natural light to flood the main gallery through skylights, the museum building brings a touch of moderation and constraint to the hot mess of the Nuevo Polanco district. The galleries are perched on top of the more public areas and there are wide-open terraces and a glass-encased “vitrine” for performances, discussions and other public events.
Its stunning interiors include massive pivoting doors, floor-to-ceiling windows, a sculptural black steel staircase and a beautiful Martin Creed marble floor installation in the basement-level bookshop. A sensible building that manages to keep afloat in a sea of crass development, the Jumex is a fittingly grown up contemporary museum for a maturing institution, that has lost most of its hip pretense – and possibly some of its brio – in its determination to earn a spot on the global art circuit. I (Mario Ballesteros)
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