Diego Rivera’s most ambitious dream begins to take shape at the Anahuacalli Museum, south of Mexico City. It’s about the call City of arts, a city-garden-museum that, according to the wish of the Mexican muralist, had to combine “several buildings and squares”. This weekend, 13 new architectural spaces have opened their doors to the public, 80 years after the prominent painter began his idyllic project. There are 6,000 square meters where nature coexists with showrooms, workshops, open-air forums and new offices. Added to this extension is the ‘Sanar’ offering located among Rivera’s collection of pre-Hispanic figures to commemorate the Day of the Dead and a cocoa festival.
“The City of the Arts is a very ambitious dream. It is Diego Rivera’s manifesto of American architecture and urbanism, a project that has a certain degree of utopia and prophetic ambition ”, Cuauhtémoc Medina, curator of contemporary art, author of Olinka, the ideal city of Dr. Atl, the chronicle of a failure of another utopian city imagined by Gerardo Murillo, Rivera’s teacher. “It is a fragment of the future”, continues Medina, “a place and an object of an alternative civilization. His condition is not only extra-temporal, but extraterrestrial. It corresponds to a historical moment of the great obsession of modern art and Mexican architecture with the Pedregal and which is close to other insane ideas such as University City, which did take place, and the Olinka City, by Dr. Atl, which was not ”.
It is a utopian place where the painter imagined a better Mexico and proposed “to bring together the artist from the school and the academy with the potter, with the weaver, with the basket maker, with the stonemason, with everything that is a pure expression. and discharge from the people of Mexico ”, according to the muralist’s own words. A city where a new culture emerged “a synthesis of the past and the present, to build a better future in what man has the right to, that is, the usufruct of beauty.” Rivera, who began the work on the Anahuacalli in 1941 — a building that seems to emerge from the ground and is built with the stone left by the Xitle volcano when it erupted in 400 BC. C., where some 2,000 Teotihuacan, Olmec, Toltec, Nahua or Zapotec figures can be seen — he saw only the sketch, plans, some debts and dreams of the project that he has begun to paint in the Anahuacalli Museum.
The artist imagined a large permanent exhibition space; a huge square of one thousand meters per side, with a stage in the center, where dance shows, theater and indigenous and civil celebrations would be presented, so that all the popular festivals from different parts of the country would be concentrated there; Surrounding the square, there would be museums of Architecture, Music and Dance, as well as concert forums, experimental theater and cinema. In these venues there would be free workshops for artists. The construction would respect the unevenness of the land, which would give it “a very special character and great beauty,” he wrote in his text. Exhibition for a project for the City of Arts (1945-1950). Diego’s idea was to get the young people out of the schools to connect them with popular art, so that the Anahuacalli was authentically a community dedicated to art.
The person in charge of carrying out this “insane idea”, a product of Diego Rivera’s fantasy, is Mauricio Rocha, one of the most important voices in architecture in Mexico, son of the famous photographer Graciela Iturbide and also the architect Manuel Rocha, who won, along with his office Architecture Workshop, the competition for the expansion and remodeling of the museum. The architect seeks not only to be respectful with the ecological environment of the site, but to be in harmony with it; follow Rivera’s logic of building public space, but with a contemporary reinterpretation. Its design is based on the concept devised by the Mexican painter to build a series of buildings that gradually build squares and patios. “Dialogue with Rivera and with Juan O’Gorman, who collaborated with him, is one of the most important challenges in my career,” says Rocha, in an interview with EL PAÍS.
“The idea is that, as in pre-Columbian cities, the buildings connect and allow the relationship between the parties. What we are trying to do is recode the idea of Rivera and O’Gorman in a contemporary language. The buildings are built on volcanic stone walls that do emerge, but tucked in, so that they have less impact with the stone and the landscape; We also created lattices, lighting atmospheres that already existed in Diego’s main building. Furthermore, with the new technologies we use, it seems that the buildings navigate in a kind of sea of lava ”, explains Rocha.
Diego Rivera maintained throughout his life a little-known hobby, that of a pre-Hispanic art collector. He came to collect more than 59,000 pieces. In order to house his enormous collection, steal it from destruction and save it from falling into foreign hands, he conceived a city-museum: Anahuacalli, which would have a series of pavilions in which artisans would keep alive the tradition of popular art. But he barely managed to see the first two floors of the central building of that, which was first completed by his daughter, the architect Ruth Rivera, along with Juan O’Gorman and the poet Carlos Pellicer, as a museum designer, in 1963, after Rivera’s death. in 1957. Now, in the Museum there is a square named Ruth Rivera, in honor of the architect and continuation of the Anahuacalli project.
Diego Rivera began the collection of pre-Hispanic art that we now know from 1921 and even before he left for the United States, in 1929. “When the collection was very incipient, around 1934, he really had the very selected pieces, he still puts a base on them. Afterwards, when it is overwhelming, when it goes to piece 30,000, it just places them where they fit, ”says Rivera’s grandson, Juan Coronel.
The project of The City of Arts was awarded by tender to the office of Mauricio Rocha and it took six years: four of projection and two of execution and includes an art gallery, a new esplanade, spaces for workshops; multipurpose rooms, a library, offices and a vault of the pre-Hispanic art collection, which will be open to the public in a controlled manner. The architectural complex is inspired by pre-Hispanic cities, Pompeii and the Bauhaus and involved an investment of about 20 million pesos.
But the jewel in the crown is the winery with the complete collection of Diego Rivera’s pre-Hispanic art. There are more than 50,000 pieces that have been hidden from the public and, although there is still no opening date for this site, they will be released soon. This repository is located in the center of the new Anahuacalli building. “With these new buildings in Rocha, the idea is for people to see the pieces that Diego accumulated from a very young age,” Juan Coronel Rivera tells this newspaper. “The central axis of the new square becomes this winery, a kind of temple of contemplation of the thousands and thousands of Diego’s pieces. What we did was put a series of concrete shelves, but now with a showcase and drawers, so that the visitor can go from one place to another seeing all the pieces ”, explains the architect Mauricio Rocha.
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