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Centro Cultural INDAABIN

VMA’s cultural centre in Mexico City features some solid and massive buildings, creating a deliberate contrast with others that are conceived as translucent or transparent.

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

The old colonial neighborhood of Coyoacan comprises some of the most notable cultural institutions of Mexico. The new INDAABIN Cultural Center is added to this list. The Cultural Center is formed by a main art gallery, an auditorium, an exhibition hall and workshops, a grand central café, preservation and cataloguing, an archive for maps and drawings, a research center and administrative and executive offices. With ecological preservation in mind, studio VMA’s first strategy was to assembly a highly qualified team of experts in areas such as biology and landscape; they also classified, catalogued and diagnosed the current health and future of all trees and plants in the site.

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VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

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VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, ground floor

11X17 CON

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, upper floor

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VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, sections

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VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, elevation

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The architects wanted visitors to navigate through a number of interlocked gardens, plazas, paths, patios, etc. that will eventually unfold and reveal a number of architectural elements and gestures. The Cultural Center is set out in four main buildings, starting off with the museum and its upper and lower galleries; both are accessible by Salvador Novo street. This building features a lower basement and a ‘shifted’ volume above it, forming an upper gallery and a lower portico. Because the volume has been shifted off in the plan, the ‘box’ is cantilevered towards two sides of the building.

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

The glass box holds the temporary exhibition hall. To create a graphic artwork skin, its fenestration is made out of dichroic glass panels from floor to ceiling. On the left side of this building there is a three-floor block that holds the research center, the archive and several administrative and technical offices. This building changes material from rusted metal to exposed concrete, suggesting also the interior change of function from conservation workshops to the café and library. Between the black box building and the ‘snake’ studio, VMA laid out a massive pergola made out of steel trusses that are covered with steel plates which makes it more organic and random. Its purpose is to shade and shelter the café’s terrace.

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

The tail of the ‘snake’ ends in the form of a staircase, suggesting a common gesture in pre-Columbian architecture. At the north end, one last building appears also as a visual end of the cross axis of the composition: the auditorium. From the overall aesthetic composition, some buildings have been thought as solid and massive creating a deliberate contrast to others that are instead translucent or transparent.

VMA – Victor Marquez Arquitectos, Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, 2017

Centro Cultural INDAABIN, Mexico City, Mexico
Program: cultural centre
Architect: VMA – Victor Marquez
Project coordinator: Angeles Miranda
Structural engineering: Ubando
Contractor: Sedena
Landscape: Jaime Schmidt, Victor Marquez, Angeles Miranda
Area: 5,705 sqm
Completion: 2017

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