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district: Benito Juarez
ARCHITECT: Rojkind arquitectos
BUILD: 2011-14
FLOOR AREA: 49,000 m2Photo: Jaime Navarro © Rojkind arquitectos
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Michel Rojkind is the founding partner of Rojkind Arquitectos, a Mexico City based architecture firm practicing globally and focusing on design, business tactics and experiential innovation. His work explores architectural solutions, social and urban strategies that positively impact society and the environment. He was also a founding member of MXDF, a collaborative research and urban studies centre devoted to exploring how to modify, transform, negotiate and mould the social, economic, political and cultural limits that shape Mexico City.
A few weeks ago, in the middle of a typical Mexico City spring downpour, the screening rooms, bathrooms and hallways of the spanking new Cineteca Nacional, the national film archive designed by Michel Rojkind, morphed into a series of waterfalls and wading pools. The flooding was the latest in a string of scandals that has surrounded the project, due to a rushed opening pushed by political interests. Rojkind’s addition to the four monoliths of Manuel Rocha’s retro-cool, 1984 original, is full of the formal bravado of most of his work: a massive roof canopy clad with a triangular lattice, darts out from the four new screening rooms all the way to the earlier buildings, covering the entire complex under a space-age cloak.
Photo: Alec Perkins
But the project’s smartest gestures have to do more with refocusing the original site programme to recover floor area and create new public spaces: for example, compressing the old parking lot into a six-storey building to gain space for greenery and an outdoor amphitheatre. These achievements make up for some of the project’s constructive shortcomings, and have transformed the Cineteca from an obscure and, to a certain extent, desolate space for hardcore arthouse film buffs, to a popular cultural destination that feels open and democratic enough to draw a wider audience to its celluloid treasures. I (Mario Ballesteros)
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»Architectural interpretations accepted without reflection could obscure the search for signs of a true nature and a higher order.«
Louis Isadore Kahn
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