Museo Soumaya

I have written probably too much about the Museo Soumaya, but here are my thoughts:

The Museo Soumaya a very interesting museum especially in the context of who designed it, who funded it, and whose art is inside of it.

You may have heard of Carlos Slim, who owns an effective monopoly over the wireless networks in Mexico. I’m paying him, and if you have a Mexican cell phone, odds are you’re paying him too. I’m guessing as to his motivation, but many men of wealth want to use their money to buy something a little more lasting- in this case, Slim wanted a museum, free to the public, to showcase his art collection. Give something back to the community, bid for immortality, blantant ego trip, take your pick.

To design the museum, which he naturally wanted to be as expressive and iconic as possible since its basically a memorial to himself, he needed a starchitect. But not just any Hadid will do.

It’s difficult to be a rising star in the architecure world. Boutique architecture firms with signature projects that win design awards are a really hard business model:

It takes a lot of time and energy and money to get clients, especially clients who want museums, public works, or even a luxury modern house. Once you design that Pritzker-prize winning Cathedral, odds are the church isn’t going to need another one for awhile. You might be able to build a house or two for a wealthy client, but houses are easy and fast and when they’re done, there’s no more houses to build for your client. If you’re a small office, you’re especially susceptible to the risks of overhiring and underhiring. Sometimes projects just fall through. You have to cast a lot of lines with a lot of bait, and sometimes nothing bites, and sometimes they all bite at the same time. There’s an unpredictability to the work flow which adds a lot of risk.

Contrast this business model with the Taco Time architects. They design nothing but Taco Times, but there’s a regularity to the work flow, a predictable schedule, you know the logistics of how and when and from where everything comes together. You finish one Taco time and the client comes back and says “Gimme two more of those."

How do fledgling starchitects do it? There’s several ways to cope.

1. Failure is always an option. Frank Lloyd Wright declared bankruptcy THREE times. One of the great modernist architecture firms in St. Louis had to shut its doors and the founders took straight jobs in bigger, more corporate and staid firms. The winner of the Pritzker prize, the biggest award in architecture declared bankrupcy less than two years after winning the award. I want to say Louis Kahn and Antonio Gaudi both died penniless and were mistaken for homeless.
2. Marry into wealth. Paolo Soleri, once he had been kicked out of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, found an heiress in Arizona and bankrolled his dream arcology of Arcosanti. Mies van der Rohe made several projects happen by becoming romantically entangled with his clients. (He must have been quite the charmer- have you seen pictures of him?)
3. Be independently wealthy. Hello architect Brad Pitt.
4. Have wealthy relatives. Buried in the portfolio of almost every starchitect and rising star is house designed for mom and dad who will let you do “crazy architecture things" and not bug you too much about the budget. Carlos Slim, one of the richest daddies in the world, has a nephew, and he’s an architect. There is little surprise with the pseudo oligarchy of Mexico City, that Fernando Romero, the favorite nephew of Carlos Slim has risen through the ranks of the architecture world. To be honest, his work is not bad. I would have applied to work there but they were looking for shorter term (read: lower paid) interns.

It’s also interesting to me that the museum also houses a Telcel information center, a company owned by Carlos Slim, and sits within a campus including the Telcel headquarters in uptown Polanco.
But that’s just polictics and business.

From an urbanistic perspective, the Museo Soumaya loses points for being virtually inaccessible for anyone hoping to use public transportation to get there. Carlos Slim wanted to bring the art from the rest of the world to the masses who will never have an opportunity to travel, but they’re going to have have to walk a few kilometers to see it.

It always bugs me when there is blatant class bias in the programing of space. Polanco had a few metro stops, but in the area where I was, the city and developers are sending a clear message: we only want people with cars here.

Anyway, the museum sits in a complex of buildings including an upscale shopping mall, a pretty cool theater still under construction beneath a giant amazing steel canopy, and some office blocks. The mall and the office blocks are about as architecturally unobtrusive as possible, massive boxes clad entirely in reflective blue glass to hold a mirror to the Soumaya.

The Soumaya is a squat building with a complex inwardly curving geometry. Its kind of like if Frank Gerhy or Karim Rashid designed a stool and covered it with dimes. The surface is very interesting, covered entirely with reflective metal hexagon tiles. It was kind of neat to see and neat to get up close to it and see the patterns of lines created when you’re at eye level.

The interior of the museum is based around a series of gentle ramps which take you from floor to floor. The art work is mostly copies of famous sculptures, although there was a smattering of good Mexican artwork.

The main public spaces are the most incredibly white areas I’ve ever seen. White marbe floors, white curving walls which flow into ceilings so you don’t even get a sharp line or contrast with the edge, like the backdrop to a photographer’s studio. The artworks in the lobby in bronze read as solid black against the stark whiteness. The eye become attracted to any color. The red fire extinguisher on the floor becomes a focal point. Actually, the other visitors become the most interesting and visually arresting component to the public spaces. Brightly colored typical Mexican colors, people moving around in groups of two or three or single, you cannot help but be drawn to the moving figures against the white ground.

It’s an interesting space, it feels like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Wars.

When I got to the top floor, I laughed. It looked like they’d run out of money to finish the grand ceiling. The white sculpted walls fell away and what covered the giant gallery was a massive web of massive metal trusses with a huge central skylight overhead in the center. It was really quite shocking against the highly finished rest of the interiors.

And the gallery itself was a maze of sculptures on pedestals, too close together, and not grouped according to any apparent rhyme or reason. It really felt like a department store floor sale.

Judges?
Effort: A
Urban planning: C+
Architecture: B
Art: B-