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Case Studies in Architectural Design | Instructor: René Davids

"MXDF Mexico City Studio": Archeological Museum and Botanical Garden, Xochilmilco District, Mexico City

The MXDF Studio was a collaboration with California College of the Arts, San Francisco (Instructor: Sandra I. Vivanco), and Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de Mexico (Instructors: Isaac Broid and Daniel Daou).

Often museums tend to be large places that house objects in warehouse style. The visitor to the museum is quickly exhausted, both from visual over-load and from standing on their feet for long periods without break. In response to this, the museum is designed as a series of small, intimate galleries; one that privileges the garden and canals. The formal language of the museum and garden took its cues from the regional character. The gardens and buildings have been organized by a series of bands that mimics the local agricultural plots and highlights the constructed nature of the landscape. The bands widths are based on the width of the local green houses. The local architecture consists of simple low-rise buildings punctured by courtyards that act as outdoor living spaces. Courtyards have been employed throughout the galleries and act on several levels. First, they modulate the light entering the galleries preventing most direct sun from entering spaces. Second, they allow water to move into the galleries, merging the buildings with the landscape. Experientially, visitors are constantly moving between indoor and outdoor rooms, from light to dark. The courtyards also serve as intimate resting spots where visitors can linger and as voids that signal an entryway.

The canal system in Xochimilco acts as markers, access and dividers. The site design employs them in the site in a similar way. The larger shallow canals serve as axes that help visitors to navigate through the gardens. The galleries have been anchored and organized on the main canals with smaller canals acting as connectors moving perpendicular to the main bands. The canals have also been used as dividers, in particular to separate the administration building from the remainder of the site.

Gisela Schmoll

Instead of being just a single building, the museum is a new layer added to the existing system of islands and neighborhoods. It operates differently on each side of the water channel; extending over the island on one side and filling the urban fabric on the other. In this way, the proposal becomes an instrument to explore and show the place and the historical and cultural context of the archeological pieces, the urban fabric, and the agricultural chinampa system and its crops.

The project proposes to keep the island alive as a production device, taking the island’s artificial landscape and layout, its seasonal cycles, changes and variations as a part of the museum’s collection.

In order to do this, the museum’s main building extends its mass and program over the island in the form of a network of boardwalks and pavilions intended to exhibit archeological pieces related to the plantations and crops. Thus the design creates a framework to exhibit the chinampa agricultural system the same way the existing walls of the houses do for the courtyards.

Bin Wang

This project consists of an archeological museum and a botanical garden, two identities that struggle against each other within a larger body of canals and informal urbanization, already in conflict, each desiring what the other despises. One needs sunlight to survive, the other darkness for the survival of its inhabitants. One needs water to grow the other shelters itself from it. One needs soil for its nutrients, the other attempts to dance around its subsidence. The proposal finds its identity in these internal conflicts. It places the experience of the visitor in between, exposing two identities to be experienced simultaneously. The agricultural landscape and built-form are juxtaposed, exaggerating the qualities of light and dark, active and static, natural and built, life and death, and to expose the ambiguities in these dichotomies.

Through the preservation of ancient farming techniques the continuous lines of infrastructural canals establish an emergent framework for the new museum; the permanent objects are placed within this framework and deform it to claim their own space. Across the deformed grid existing paths are linked through the site, making connections within the larger context as well as within the museum itself.

The building strategy depends on the display of the permanent objects for its organization. Permanent objects are placed at the center of concentric rings of landscape and covered with thin shells of concrete in order to construct panoramic views that start the dialogue between old and new, built and natural, dead and living. The support and temporary exhibition spaces for the museum are located within the middle ground of this construction while directing the paths that link between nodes of display. Predicated on the fact that materials are more expensive than labor, the proposal attempts to use minimal amounts of materials to accomplish maximum depth, enabled through shell and folding techniques of the surface assembly.

Brian Washburn