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Hotel Camino Real

A sophisticated exhibition curated by Pablo León de la Barra, at Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura in Mexico City, focuses on the iconic Camino Real Hotel (1968) designed by Ricardo Legorreta.

Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura presents ARCHIVO(S) Hotel Camino Real, a proposal by curator Pablo León de la Barra focused on the iconic Camino Real Hotel (1968) designed by architect Ricardo Legorreta.

The opening was part of Zona MACO Mexico Contemporary Art, one of the most important fairs of contemporary art in Latin America.

The proposal offers an immersive reconstruction; a journey through different periods, characters and key moments in the history of the hotel, taking the original collaborations with artists and designers such as Alexander Calder, Anni Albers, Lance Wyman, Mathias Goeritz, Pedro Friedeberg, Armando Salas Portugal and Julius Shulman.

ARCHIVO(S) Hotel Camino Real, exhibition view

Built for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, The Camino Real Hotel not only not only challenged the conventional standards of modern hotel design and but consolidated Legorreta’s own characteristic architectural style, but became a parallel modern art museum of sorts, a building that perfectly embodied the optimism, creative effervescence and aesthetic ambitions of Mexico in the sixties.

Through historic photographs and documents, reproductions, original furniture and a 1:75 scale model of the hotel commissioned for the exhibition and created by Legorreta’s original model maker, as well as contemporary approaches by artists like Mario García Torres and Lake Verea, ARCHIVO(S) Hotel Camino Real attempts to rescue the original spirit of the project and document the transformations the building has gone through in recent decades.