Built on the lava fields of Mexico City, Taller Mauricio Rocha’s extension to the Anahuacalli Museum belongs to a constellation of utopias across the city
On 20 February 1943, on the Quitzocho plain of the state of Michoacán in Mexico, the Paricutín volcano was born. The ground began to crack and a dark cone emerged out of nowhere, spitting fire, ash and lava. The town of San Juan Parangaricutiro disappeared almost entirely – but not quite. The altar, a portion of the facade, and one of the towers of the town’s church survived. People thought it was a miracle. Nowadays, processions arrive at the temple and offer mass in the middle of the basaltic rock field.
These solidified lava fields, with their arid and tortuous surfaces, are called malpaíses, or badlands, but not like the ones in South Dakota; malpaíses are solid basaltic formations that express the violence of Central Mexico’s volcanoes. In the country’s collective unconscious, there is something that links its inhabitants to these infertile wastelands, reminiscent of crumpled sheets of paper that still possess a very silent spirit.
When the Paricutín erupted, an extravagant character, Gerardo Murillo, known as Dr Atl, moved to a nearby cabin and started to produce an extensive series of paintings and drawings of the volcanic activity. A famous painter, writer and occasional Nazi admirer, Dr Atl was obsessed with the Mexican landscape and the idea of constructing a Ciudad Ideal (ideal city) in the middle of it. Olinka, inspired by Nietzschean ideas, would be the place where an intellectual, artistic and scientific aristocracy form a new uncorrupted society. Throughout his life, Dr Atl proposed several places where this city could be constructed: there are even some sketches of preliminary designs by the architect Jacobo Königsberg, although Olinka remained only a utopian dream.
Dr Atl was part of a group of avant-garde personalities in mid-20th-century Mexico who were anxious to transform the semi‑rural country they lived in into a modern nation. They were yearning for utopia. Curiously, several of these characters gathered around another malpaís. Luis Barragán, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Armando Salas Portugal, José Clemente Orozco, Dr Atl, Chucho Reyes, Juan O’Gorman and Max Cetto strolled many times together in the basaltic landscape formed by the eruption of the Xitle volcano that happened around 245–315 CE in the southern part of Mexico City.
Captured by artists in drawings and paintings, including this 1946 sketch by Dr Atl, the basaltic malpaís create an abrupt and stoney landscape
This was the volcanic ecosystem where two of the most important urban and architectural projects of Mexican modernity were constructed: the Pedregal Gardens, a residential development also known as El Pedregal, designed in 1945 by some investors, among them Barragán, which turned into one of the most exclusive places to live in the city; and Ciudad Universitaria, the campus of the largest university in Latin America, in which practically every modern architect working in Mexico City in the 1950s participated.
Both projects are intimately linked to this stone territory and use different strategies to deal with it. It is the case of most of Ciudad Universitaria buildings and the houses designed by Cetto, Artigas, or Attolini in the Pedregal Gardens, there is an emphasis on the contrast between modern architecture placed in a clean way on top of the wild terrain in accordance with the spirit of its time: concrete, metal and glass boxes as perfect pieces that simply overlook the rocky formations. Another strategy, more related to the tradition of prehispanic architecture, blends structures into the landscape, only shaping it in a subtle way. Barragán’s gardens at El Pedregal constitute small interventions where a single wall or a well-positioned set of stairs create intimate enclosures. At Ciudad Universitaria, the Olympic Stadium, designed by Augusto Pérez Palacios, Jorge Bravo Jimenez and Raúl Salinas in 1952, emerges from the existing topography, forming an asymmetric bowl that disappears smoothly outwards; Alberto T Arai’s handball courts from the same year are a landscape sequence of stone slopes; and the Espacio Escultórico, added in 1979, is a series of concrete pieces positioned in a circle, simply defining a fragment of the lava landscape.
These developments were huge collective processes, in the public as well as the private realms. A third project in the same malpaís area was an individualistic oddity created by the imagination of artist Diego Rivera: the Anahuacalli. In 1942, Rivera bought four hectares of land in San Pablo Tepetlapa in order to build a museum for his vast collection of more than 50,000 prehispanic pieces. But he needed something more: he wanted to create a Ciudad de las Artes, or City of the Arts, in the same utopian essence as Dr Atl but with a more socially oriented perspective. The Anahuacalli would be the main building of an architectural ensemble organised around a big plaza with a stage in its centre, surrounded by portals leading to artisan ateliers and different spaces dedicated to architecture, music and dance. Rivera always considered this project as his legacy – the place where the general public could see the collection he’d gathered throughout his life.
The Anahuacalli is an architectural curiosity that distances itself from the purity of modern architecture; it is an uninviting building, provoking more terror than serenity. It is a peculiar vision of prehispanic architecture, a pastiche of Toltec, Mexica, and Mayan references mixed with the painter’s whimsical imagination, an invention of what prehispanic life would be in the contemporary world. It could be seen as the first postmodern building in Mexico, with no intention whatsoever of being so.
A symbolic narrative occurs in its inner organisation: the Underworld, from where there is an ascent towards the level of Life, and the level of Paradise. Dante in a Mesoamerican version. Nevertheless, the Anahuacalli accomplishes its purpose of transmitting the cultural heaviness of a past which in many ways resembles the malpaís that surrounds it. Even though stone was used for its construction, the relationship of the building to its environment is more conceptual than physical: it denies a respectful integration and opts for an ironic monumentality.
The other character in this story is O’Gorman, who helped Rivera with the technical aspects of the design. From this collaboration the idea arose to cover the inner ceilings with multicoloured mosaics with a technique used and perfected later by O’Gorman to cover the facades of Ciudad Universitaria’s Central Library. His house, built nearby, uses stone in a total integration with nature, not in a sense of balance, but as the complete dominance of nature over human-made structures.
Rivera died before Anahuacalli was completed. It was finished by O’Gorman, Ruth Rivera and Heriberto Pagelson. The official opening was in 1964.
Diego Rivera collected around 50,000 prehispanic objects and pieces of art during his lifetime, only 2,000 of which were on display in the original museum
Credit: Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera Archives / Bank of Mexico, Fiduciary in the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museum Trust
A new repository contains concrete shelves and drawers to display and store thousands more
Credit: Onnis Luque
It is difficult to finish other people’s utopias – even more so when it is the idea of such a character as Diego Rivera, and the project involves dealing with such a building as Anahuacalli. For many years, the Anahuacalli complex included the main building, the plaza and two auxiliary buildings designed by O’Gorman, and the rest of the Ciudad de las Artes was forgotten. That is until recently, when a competition for the extension of the ensemble was launched. Mauricio Rocha’s practice won the competition and construction finished in 2021. Rocha chose to be discreet, to keep a modest silence in his proposal. The answer to the problem was not to compete, but to create several volumes that form a system that can be eventually expanded. The extension tries to keep the original spirit of the project, and plazas are the main elements around which the pavilions are organised: a library, the collection warehouse, the workshops, offices and services.
The greatest virtue of Rocha’s project is the subtlety with which he recovers the modernist tradition of positioning the buildings on the ground almost without touching it. Basalt stone is used as a tectonic system, both in the vertical structural elements as well as in the stone lattices on the facades of the pavilions, reminiscent of the windows inside the Anahuacalli. Pavilions are slightly elevated from the jagged terrain, creating the sensation of floating stones in the landscape. It is a definitive strategy, to understand that rocks are better left alone, let vegetation invade them, let lava talk, and let Anahuacalli scream, but limit architecture to float in its role as an anonymous observer.
Credit: Sandra Pereznieto
Maybe a lesson to learn from modernity is to lose faith in any kind of utopia. The Ciudad Ideal, the Ciudad de las Artes, are fantastic names that generate enthusiasm, but history has told us many times how these stories end. We are left with the wasteland, the dried lava, the malpaís. And if we look attentively, we do not need anything else. It is a time for humble, efficient solutions. Maybe the miracle is not that lava stops in front of the altars, but to understand that this is the perfect stage for keeping silent.
