TEN Arquitectos/ Enrique Norten

The original building of the Chopo Museum was manufactured just before the turn of the century in Germany, as a pavilion for an exhibition on industry and art in Düsseldorf. After the exhibition, the structure was imported to Mexico City, where it was reassembled in the neighborhood of Santa María la Ribera. The German structure was long used as a museum of natural history but was abandoned in the 1960s. Since then, it has been appropriated as a space for performing arts, installations, concerts, events, and film shoots, and now, administered by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, it is at the center of one of the liveliest art scenes in the city.

While the open, pavilion-like structure lent itself well to various uses, the museum proposed expansion and improvement, particularly of the environmental controls, in order to meet international museum standards. The expansion is an inserted volume within the original structure. The original pavilion is left untouched, serving as a shell around this added volume.

The structure of the insertion is entirely autonomous, producing a series of ramped gallery spaces that fill the old building yet barely seem to touch the ground. The arched cast-iron trusses of the nineteenth-century pavilion are subtly reinterpreted in the glass facades and truss system of the bridges and ramps in the new volume. The upper levels of the ramps offer a view up to the iron lattices and wooden beams of the soaring ceiling of the original building and down to the nested gallery spaces. The expansion also includes auditoriums in a below-grade excavation and a library near the roof.