MX_SI and SPRB Arquitectos has been selected to design the Papalote Children’s Museum in Iztapalapa, Mexico. With the slogan “Let’s Make City”, the winning team’s project opens up the museum to public space by generating a continuous space between the plaza and the ground floor of the new building. The future facility is scheduled to open in 2017.
The winning project is clearly intended to be an activator in the urban environment. It is a design for an integrative museum that opens up to the city and is incorporated into public space, creating physical continuity on the ground floor and visual continuity on the upper storeys, via great windows on the city.
The urban strategy of the museum sets out to recover the value of public space as a meeting place at street level and respond harmoniously to the urban junction in which it is set.
The building is set back a few metres from the street to generate an urban plaza, a great public lobby that acts as an extension to the museum. Access to the centre is via a diffuse boundary, a forest of column walls that draw the plaza into the inside of the complex.
The public brief of café, gift shop, etc. is located on the ground floor, where there is no access control, and the interactive layout of the exhibition areas located on the upper floors starts on the mezzanine floor, where the multipurpose rooms and foyer of the IMAX cinema and theatre are also situated.
The different levels of the museum house the various briefs, each with an outdoor space with specific characteristics, such as terraces and gardens. The building’s floor plan is laid out in 10-metre strips that respond to the structural rhythm of the construction module, comprising exposed concrete screen walls that are joined by a V-shaped beam-roof.
These walls make up the museum’s abstract forest and are designed with careful attention to texture, in a reference to the trunks of the Tree of Tule, with its stout, rugged base that branches out and becomes narrower towards the top. The grouping of modules according to a strategy of horizontal and vertical movement generates the volume of the new museum. Source by MX_SI .
Location: Iztapalapa, Mexico
Architets: MX_SI architectural studio + SPRB Arquitectos
Project Team: Mara Partida, Boris Bezan, Héctor Mendoza. Laura Sánchez Penichet, Carlos Rodríguez Bernal
Collaborators: Olga Bombac, Oscar Fabian Espinosa, Ricardo Valdivia, Lidia Nájera, Claudia Bucio
Structural engineer: BEST Consultoría Estructural Barcelona,
Nacho Costales, Carlos Jaen, BEST Consultoría Estructural Guadalajara Ing. Andrés Velasco
Client: Papalote Museo del Niño
Area: 17.500 m2
Budget: 275.000.000 MXN (aprox.)
Year Competition: 2015
Year Construction: 2017
Images: Courtesy of MX_SI architectural studio
