Like most museums built during that decade, the Sumaya Museum is an unusual building, visible from afar, built by a fashionable parametrist architect. But if we look closely, we will see more differences than similarities.
During the "museum boom", museums of contemporary art were usually built, often without a permanent exhibition. The same museum was built specifically for the existing collection, the main part of which is a large collection of Rodin bronzes. Those museums were often built in provincial centers on the initiative of the authorities, and one of their tasks was to attract investment to the city, revitalize the city's economy. This museum is private, it was built in the capital, and the most it claims to be is to revive the economy of the nearest quarter. Finally, those museums were often built by "stars" architects, competitions for them became notable events in the architectural world. The design of this museum was entrusted to the customer's son-in-law without competition.
And this customer and owner of the collection exhibited there is Carlos Slim Heliu, the richest man in the world 2010 according to Forbes magazine: the owner of a holding that, as Mexicans joke, owns every cactus in the country. He began collecting art in the 1980s, buying up those works that, as the instinct of a financial speculator told him, would greatly increase in price in the future. Over time, "commercial" gathering has become a hobby. The collection that Carlos Slim has created to date is huge and diverse. It contains about 70,000 items, among them - "Madonna dei Fusi" by Leonardo da Vinci or his circle, works by Tintoretto, El Greco, Murillo, Rubens, Monet, Cezanne, Degas, Van Gogh, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Dali and Miro. The collection contains more than a hundred works by Rodin - this is the largest private and second largest collection of his sculptures in the world in general, as well as many works by Mexican artists, both the muralists Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo, and portrait painters of the colonial era. The collection contains historical costumes and coins. The museum is named after the late wife of the billionaire, who partly influenced the formation of the collection.
The author of the project is a young Mexican architect Fernando Romero, who managed to work in the workshop of Rem Koolhaas. Returning from Europe to his homeland, Romero founded his own office in Mexico City. He is married to the daughter of Carlos Slim and successfully collaborates with his father-in-law in his large-scale development projects. However, his competitive and "paper" works are better known: for example, the project of a butterfly-shaped bridge connecting Mexico and the United States, a smaller version of which the architect built in the form of a tea pavilion in the Jinhua Architecture Park - a collection of architectural kunstucks collected by Ai Weiwei; and the villa in Istap is a house no less fantastic in shape.
The Sumaya Museum is a six-story steel-framed tower. The shape of this tower, as connoisseurs of digital design suggest, was created using an algorithm of a few simple commands. The floors are connected by ramps, but there is no atrium or light wells that cut through several levels. The tower stands on a five-tiered underground car park, which has a capacity that far exceeds the museum's needs. The walls, covered with mirror-polished aluminum plates, have no windows: daylight enters the building only from above and illuminates only the upper floor. According to the original plan, the walls of the museum were to be made of the so-called. transparent concrete, but, at the insistence of the customer, it was replaced with a conventional one with aluminum cladding. Also Carlos Slim, an engineer by training, demanded to change the structure of the building. As conceived by the architect, all the supporting supports were to be hidden in the thickness of the outer wall, but the customer considered that the construction would cost him less if it was simplified by bringing several columns into the interior.
The museum is free to enter and is open to the public seven days a week. Carlos Slim declares that this is his "gift to the city." A precious gift: Mexico City has not yet had a large art museum with a collection of European art from the 15th to 19th centuries, similar to those found in every major city in Europe and the largest cities in the United States. The opening of the museum is also a patriotic gesture, because it exhibits a large collection of Mexican art, and the fact that the works of old European masters hang in the neighboring rooms, to some extent, equalizes both traditions.
But it seems that Slim's intentions are not exclusively philanthropic. The museum was built in the area of the commercial development "Plaza Carso" (Plaza Carso); next door is a five-star hotel and a shopping center. The developer of Plaza Carso is Grupo Carso, controlled by Carlos Slim. It is also planned to build another museum there, this time of contemporary art, where the richest collection of the Jumex corporation will be exhibited (the architect will be David Chipperfield). Apparently, developers expect that the two largest art museums in the capital will raise the value of commercial real estate in the area and thus help to recover the funds spent on their construction. Although Carlos Slim himself claims that the construction of the museum is his disinterested gift to the city and the country, while the development project is a completely different matter, not related to the museum, in articles about "Plaza Carso" in publications on real estate, the museum is invariably given attention; its strange floating tower, which stands out sharply against the background of banal glass prisms, has already become the hallmark of the area.
This is not unusual: many commercial development zones are striving to acquire an "iconic building" - a building that would become their symbol and a "magnet" that attracts visitors. As a rule, these are public buildings, museums or theaters. Such, for example, is a whole ensemble of "iconic buildings" that are being built in Hamburg's Hafencity according to the design of the most famous architects. And this strategy necessarily presupposes a “futuristic” solution to the decoy building.
Interestingly, the appearance of the Sumaya Museum does not say anything about the function of the building - there is no sign, there is no space for large posters announcing exhibitions. But this is not necessary. A computer-generated surface of complex curvature, which at the dawn of parametric architecture was considered suitable for enclosing any function in it, in the 2000s has become a sign by which a common man among urban development unmistakably guesses a museum.