The Júmex Museum is the first project realised by David Chipperfield in Latin America. The 43,000 square-foot museum will house the most important private art collection in Latin America, assembled by Eugenio López Alonso, heir to a Mexican fruit juice fortune.
Museo Jumex presents a selection of over 2750 artworks by contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons, Olafur Eliasson and Tacita Dean, as well as Mexican artists including Abraham Cruzvillegas, Gabriel Orozco, Francis Alÿs and Damián Ortega.
The building struggles to deal with other cultural institutions on the Plaza Carso, as the Soumaya Museum, designed by Fernando Romero Enterprise, and a underground theatre topped by a giant canopy of interlocked, canted steel blades by Madrid’s Ensamble Studio .
David Chipperfield Architects collaborated with local studio TAAU, led by architect Óscar Rodríguez, on the design of the building, which features a sawtooth roof that brings natural light into the top floor galleries.
On the outside it looks with a massive form without openings, except for a few large orthogonal voids in the outer walls. Thus the museum does not signal its contents or its raison d’être to the outside world in any overt or frenetic way.
Practically smothered by its surroundings, the Museo Jumex surprisingly manages to stand out like a little neomodernist fortress, clad in a creamy locally-sourced travertine, that reminiscent some pre-Columbian forms.
At ground level, the building is propped on stubby cylindrical columns so that the plaza, shared with the Soumaya Museum and the Cervates Theatre foyer, flows directly into the belly of the Chipperfield museum.
It may seem contradictory that the Soumaya Museum, with its wilfully contemporary design, houses works from centuries past whereas López, with his vanguard agenda, selected a comparatively timeless architecture.
The triangular plan, which instigates the wedge-like form, derives from the presence on the site of a functioning railway, favoring a vertical development of the building without.
The interior is illuminated not via normative windows punched into the building’s skin but through a few large orthogonal voids in the outer walls and, indirectly, from roof lights that determine the characteristic sawtooth profile.
Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Architect: David Chipperfield Architects
Local architects: TAAU
Area: 43,000 square-foot
Year: 2013
Client: Jumex foundation
