Mexican Literature Museum

Project idea

The Mexican Literature Museum is a place for exhibit and shelter the literary heritage from Mexico. It is very important the creation a museum like this because in Mexico there are not a specific site that promote and archive writer’s works. There are many libraries and in at time there was a small Writers Museum, however, all the books and manuscript are straggling around the country or many of them was carrying to USA for not to be a proper place to conserve in Mexico. Further, the Museum will include an institute to train future writers and an archive where restore books and a specialized library for consulting writer’s material.

The Museum is located at Downtown of Mexico City, in a urban context of Nacional Museums and historical buildings. That was a special design condition because there are rules for care the urban image and keep the historic downtown. Some of them about color of facade, regular shape and building height. In the project of the Literature Museum I respect the urban image and the rules before said but I do a reinterpretation of elements of Mexican colonial architecture and concepts about books. The windows open towards the city and frame the important buildings of its surroundings.
The composition of the museum is around a central patio following the shape of the site. In this central patio is the main circulation and the entry of each gallery. The facade is a composition of regular windows that some of them have a parasol that open outside. This are an abstraction of open books pastes.
The project of the Mexican Literature Museum will be the idoneal place for shelter writer’s work, Mexican and international writers. It is thought of as an avant-garde place that makes the world of letters tangible in an architectural work.

Project description

The museum is made up of two sites, currently empty, one of them in the corner of the streets Eje Central and Avenida Hidalgo and the other one in front of this and it is planned to connect it by a bridge. In the ground floor there are public spaces; the auditorium, conference hall, the writers institute, the museum shop and a library. In the other site there are the archive with restore laboratory and a local for a bookstore. In the first floor there are six galleries, corresponding to historical epoch of Mexican literature; Gallery 1 Prehispanic Literature, Gallery 2 Colonial Literature, Gallery 3 Modernism, Gallery 4 Century XX Vanguards, Gallery 5 Octavio Paz-Present, Gallery 6 Foreign Writers. Those galleries are distributed in both sites across the bridge. Also, in this floor there are an exhibition of personal writer’s library and an investigation part of the archive. In the second floor there are two galleries more, those are for temporary exhibitions, a cafeteria and the public part of the archive. There are two basements for parking and installations.

Technical information

The building is made with a structure of mixed frames of concrete columns and steel beams, the facade is made of terracotta-colored fiber cement panels. The foundation is based on a foundation box

Documentation

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