A SYMBOL OF INSSURECTION

The place of “Three-Cultures”, located in Tlateloco area in Mexico City, is a place with a big story. On one side, we find the base of an Aztec pyramid with the temple of Santiago, on the other side a lot of foreign Affairs Ministry’s modern buildings.

When the Conquistadors, led by Cortes conquered the area, the Aztec directed by Cuauhtemoc were In Tlatelolco. There they made their last combat. They have been massacred with their family, forty thousand in all, the 13th August 1521!

In may 1968, there where a revolt of the students in France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, in the United States and Mexico. In the 2nd October 1968, just ten days before the celebration of the summer Olympic Games in Mexico City, the Place of Three-Cultures was the scene of “Massacre of Tlatelolco”. More than three hundred students were killed by the army and the police force.

Between the vestiges of a prehispanic and colonial past, and the Utopia of the Modern Movement, drawn by Mario Pani in the Sixties, the ECO-MIC project (Ecological and Metropolitan Infographic Center) creates a new symbol of insurrection. Against the lost of freedom and resignation of modernity!

AN ECOLOGICAL TOWER

The aim of the project is to join spaces of exposures in an ecological tower, and deal with the current archaeological course. The tower will come out from the foundations of an Aztec construction. This project is a contemporary minaret interacting with the Santiago’s temple and the horizontality of the modern bars. The spinal column of the tower is created by verticals circulations. Linked all around, boxes and hanging gardens contain the dense program of the museum. This tower is a contemporary vertical landscape. A challenge to gravity. A recovered freedom!

Each entity, office, workshop, exposure or file spaces, has its own expression. The organisational diagram is perfectly read from external public space. Each course of the visitor is visible. The various graphic expressions of the territory of Mexico City are exposed on all the boxes of the tower. Including the codes prehispanic, the colonial, revolutionary and contemporary plans, the subway plans, the seisms areas or the infrastructures charts. Scenography is spread along the electronic tape including the structure. This electronic tape deals information through an optical fibre network to the several boxes and showrooms. Thanks to this system the infographic data are shown on interiors and exteriors façades.

The ECO-MIC Project is an interface between passed and future creating a new skyline between the architectural landscape and the metropolis. This green tower is part of the ecology movement, incorporating renewable energies such as the photovoltaic wind mills.

Its vocation of information is clearly expressed to the citizens, as much as its flexibility space mixing the prehispanic, colonial and modern entities. It is an ambitious project talking with Mexico and her future development.

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