- Year: 2011
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Photographs:Yoshihiro Koitani
Text description provided by the architects. Every year, the ECO Experimental Museum in Mexico City, organizes a competition for a temporary pavilion designed to house various events at the main patio of the exemplary building designed in 1953 by the artist Matthias Goeritz. This year MMX Studio has won the first prize for the 2011 ECO Pavilion.
The design does not seek to create a stand-alone piece at the main courtyard; on the contrary, the intervention tries to strengthen the key assets of the original museum, creating an extension of the architectural experiment that the original building pursues.
The original building was design as an interwoven sequence of emotions created through the carefully envisioned progression of crooked spaces, light intensity changes and views. As we acknowledge that, the design for the temporary pavilion creates a new chain of perceptual events that are linked to the original sequence. The intervention encourages the visitor to move around the space and discover new fields, new sights and new perspectives. The design creates a field operation from which new perspectives emerge as one goes through it.
The pavilion is composed by two interwoven systems of ropes running freely through the two courtyards. The new three-dimensional surfaces, create screens of varying densities that reconfigure the openness of the original courtyards into a more confined and enclosed space.
The new confined space changes constantly as it gets flooded with shadows produced by the rope system. Thus the courtyard becomes an ever changing stage that responds to both, the movement of the visitor and the changing patterns of light through the day.
