Taller De Arquitectura Mauricio Rocha, S.C.

Anahuacalli Museum

Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo

Anahuacalli Museum

Taller De Arquitectura - Mauricio Rocha

AREA
4765 m²

YEAR
2021

LOCATION
Ciudad De México, Mexico

CATEGORY
Museum

PROJECT TEAM
Mauricio Rocha, Adrian Iturriaga, Elisa Murillo, Israel Espín, Juan Carlos Montiel, David Noble

INTERIOR DESIGN
Esterlina Campuzano

SITE SUPERVISION
Direcontec S.a. De C.v.

STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING
Grupo Sai S.a. De C.v.

ELECTRICITY, SAFETY AND COMUNICATIONS
Estructuras Digitales De México

CONTRACTOR
Arquitech Constructora, S.a. De C.v.

LIGHTING CONSULTANT
Deneb & Polux

HYDRAULIC ENGINEERING
Enrique Zenón

CLIMATE CONTROL SYSTEMS
Grupo Cyvsa

CLIENTS
Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, Fideicomiso De Los Museos Diego Rivera Y Frida Kahlo, Banco De Méxicov

Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo
Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo

English description provided by 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.

Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo
Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo

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.

Anahuacalli Museum
© Sandra Pereznieto
Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo
Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque

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.

Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque
Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque

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.

Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque
Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque

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.

Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque
Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque

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.

Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo
Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque

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.

Anahuacalli Museum
© Sandra Pereznieto
Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque

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.

Anahuacalli Museum
© Sandra Pereznieto
Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo
Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque

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.

Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque
Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo


Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo
Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo
Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo
Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo
Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque
Anahuacalli Museum
© Rafael Gamo
Anahuacalli Museum
© Onnis Luque


Anahuacalli Museum
Section 1-1'
Anahuacalli Museum
Section 2-2'
Anahuacalli Museum
Section 3-3'


Anahuacalli Museum
Basement floor plan
Anahuacalli Museum
Ground floor plan
Anahuacalli Museum
Existing floor plan
Anahuacalli Museum
Site plan


Anahuacalli Museum
Detail section

Taller De Arquitectura Mauricio Rocha, S.C.
T +52 55 56612120
Taller De Arquitectura Mauricio Rocha, S.C.
Av. Miguel Ángel de Quevedo 95, Chimalistac, Álvaro Obregón, 01070 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico