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Architects: ATELIER ARS
- Area: 3100 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:César Béjar
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Manufacturers: Hermman Luxe, Ladrillera Mecanizada, MOOMA Mosaicos
Text description provided by the architects. The intervention project of the existing auditorium and its expansion as a cultural center was requested by the Culture Ministry of the State of Jalisco, to meet the goals of the program known as Cardinal Culture. This program seeks to decentralize culture and spread it in different regions of the state through the construction of different cultural complexes. Our project is located on the shore of Lake Chapala, the largest lake in Mexico.
Its coastline is the most important settlement of foreigners in the country, due to the benefits of its climate and peaceful lifestyle. It was very important for us that our project could communicate part of the cultural history of the site.
That's why we set out to investigate and learn about some of the founding myths of the ancient Wixárika culture, which has one of its most important ceremonial centers on Lake Chapala.
Natural formation and myth. In the Paleozoic era, the lake was part of a fjord from the Pacific Ocean. Due to volcanic activity, the topographic system known as the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt emerged.
This phenomenon separated the great inland sea to which Lake Chapala belonged, delimited by topographic eminences. Over the centuries, these natural phenomena produced the ecosystem that we know today, with a very particular identity in terms of the mineral configuration of the subsoil, vegetation, fauna, climate, etc., where the presence of the lake is a fundamental factor for understanding the foundational cultures of the place.
The myths of this pre-Hispanic culture allude to these processes of topographic and aquifer formation of the site. Their legends tell us about the emergence of the lake through a process of desiccation, in which a goddess plunged her staff into the seabed, causing the water to descend and also producing the formation of an islet, in the same place where today the most important sanctuary of the Wixárika culture is located. Our intervention tries to narrate some of these myths in a simple and understandable way for anyone, which we approach in three different moments as part of a landscape narrative.
Rethinking preexistence. For the configuration of the new cultural center, the starting point of our intervention was the recovery of the preexisting on the site: an auditorium for 400 people and an office building. The auditorium already contained a portico with traditional brick vaults that we recognized as the most valuable preexisting element in architectural terms.
That is why we decided that the rest of the buildings would be constructed with clay elements from the region, using different formats and construction systems, to produce a sense of unity, and in turn, as a way of helping to perpetuate the artisanal knowledge that is still found in the region.
Although none of these preexisting buildings had heritage value, we decided to recover them and integrate them into the new complex, to which we added three new elements: a library as the facade of the complex, a longitudinal service building with a music classroom, dance hall, and open-air amphitheater, and finally a central water mirror.
The location of the new buildings was done in a way that they could function as boundaries, and so that their presence transmitted the idea of enclosure. Therefore, the library building is clearly aligned with the avenue and the long service building, on its part, delimits the eastern side of the site.
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