Renderings Axel Fridman

An underground museum that integrates the latest green technologies into the building and aims for a user-generated experience

Scheduled to open in winter 2012, The Papalote Verde Children’s Museum, located in Monterrey, Mexico will be an interactive and innovative museum that integrates the latest green technology into a bold and radical architecture.

In this project the concept of a ”museum” is addressed from an entirely new perspective, as the building itself becomes part of the learning experience. A museum is usually conceived as series of rooms explaining different subjects and following a rigid sequence. In this case the core subject is present and dealt with throughout the entire museum and understood in different contexts thus enabling the visitor to build his own path.

The project explores two main strategies, one the restoration of existing buildings on site and two, the underground construction of a new building. The underground space reduces impact on the environment to a minimum and avoids conflict with the functioning of Parque Fundidora by disappearing inside the landscape. The restoration of two exiting industrial structures of the old Fundidora steel mill helps introduce a new program into an under-used space and improve its current condition.

It is expected to become Mexico’s first LEED Platinum certificate.

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Given their vast differences of scale and function, what do a beach house for two writers, a children’s museum, and the planned world’s largest ecological park have to do with one another? All were conceived and planned by the visionary Mexican architect Iñaki Echeverria, with his passion for creating livable environments for a variety of populations, always in consonance with nature and in ways which protect it.

Initially known only in Mexico for his residences and apartment houses, each integrated harmoniously into the landscape and incorporating space and circulation as components of the design that transform transitional spaces into living spaces, this bold advocate of ecological principles achieved attention and recognition far beyond the borders of his native country through his strategy and design for the Texcoco Lake Ecological Park, the world’s largest urban park, set at the edge of Mexico City, which occupies an area of 143 million square meters.

Iñaki Echeverria has endowed Texcoco Lake and its surroundings – which had been forgotten for more than 30 years – with a new cutting edge purpose: the most important “green zone” in the valley’s infrastructure, the ecopark will make an essential contribution to improving the regional climate while serving as a recreational space for inhabitants of the metropolis as well as visitors from around the world.

The concept – based on the interrelationship and integration of a range of functions, and involving wetlands, agriculture, aquatic sports, local recreational, sports, and leisure activities, promenades, and small thematic museums – is referred to by Iñaki Echeverria  as “Cultural Ecology.” This term also applies to his children’s museum Papalote Verde Monterrey, currently in progress, and the recipient in 2012 of the first LEED Platinum Certificate, awarded in Mexico.

With this relatively small museum, the Mexican architect already demonstrated his innovative abilities in striking ways. If his visionary design for the Texcoco Lake Park –with its social and ecological ambitions – comes to fruition in the near future, Mexico will become exemplary for comparable if not directly similar projects around the globe.

I sincerely wish Iñaki Echeverria and his homeland Mexico every success with this undertaking.

Kristin Feireiss

Oct 2011

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Link to AEDES Gallery

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