Michan Architecture and Parabase’s pavilions at Mexico City’s Jardín y Pabellón Escénico Chapultepec plant a new paradigm for performing arts in urban park environments
One of the world’s great urban parks, Mexico City’s Bosque de Chapultepec is at once the main green lung oxygenating the metropolis’s infinite sprawl; a respite for countless families that, looking to unwind, flock to its playgrounds, lawns, and cultural sites every weekend; and in need of rehabilitation. Its fraying edges are not surprising given that the forest’s history can be traced back over 3,000 years. After the 1325 founding of Mexico City—named Tenochtitlan at the time—Chapultepec’s natural springs made it a sacred and strategic place for the Mexican people, supplying essential water to their capital. Around 1900, under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the park took on its current form as a public recreation spot stretching over 1,600 acres. Paved roads were traced, an artificial lake was excavated, and the park’s first two sections were adorned with plazas and fountains. (The less-frequented third section’s wooded areas remain home to rich wildlife.) An erstwhile military school atop a hill became a lavish castle in which the republic’s presidents resided until the move to a more modern estate, also in Chapultepec, in 1941.
Since then, Chapultepec has undergone further transformation, reflecting Mexico’s larger political, economic, and cultural changes. But no rehaul of the iconic forest has been as ambitious as the one launched by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who enlisted the artist Gabriel Orozco to oversee a grand master plan to revitalize the vast park, repair its neglected corners, and replace outdated facilities with state-of-the-art infrastructure. Under the banner “nature and culture,” around half a billion dollars are said to have been allotted to spiff up 2.66 square miles, with a focus on new pathways to connect the park’s distinct areas, foster social engagement, and create new venues for accessible culture programming. Aligned with López Obrador’s populism—under “AMLO,” the presidential residence was opened to the public as a museum and the ancient park became home to a huge Ferris wheel—all new projects, including a skate park and the city’s third state-funded cinematheque, were designed to attract a broad swath of users, without regard to educational background or economic ability. This is a welcome departure from Chapultepec’s existing offerings, which include fine art museums and the National Auditorium, where tickets to see established music acts command hefty prices.
Landscape architecture firm Taller de Paisaje Entorno’s design incorporates bermed plantings as a backdrop to the pavilions. (Arturo Arrieta)
Up until a year ago, a partially unpaved and abandoned piece of land, sometimes used as parking, bordered the east side of the National Auditorium’s massive edifice, whose impressive scale was emphasized in a 1991 redesign by Abraham Zabludovsky and Teodoro González de León. But since February 2024, a different tableau greets anyone who enters the 7-hectare plot to the left of the dated-looking auditorio from Reforma Avenue. What appears to be an inviting, carefully designed garden full of native plants turns out—once the visitor has walked well into its winding paths past grassy mounds and a little artificial waterway—to contain three deceivingly light structures that blur with the vegetation, their glazed, canopied forms peeking through age-old trees. The whole ensemble is the new Jardín y Pabellón Escénico Chapultepec (literally “Scenic Garden and Pavilion,” with escénico referring not to views but to the performing arts the garden and its main structure are designed to host).
The roof coverings are hollow cement shells wrapped around a steel structure that float above the glass facades. (Arturo Arrieta)
The pavilions were designed by the Mexico City firm of Michan Architecture, which collaborated with the international studio Parabase. Born out of a competition that was part of the Chapultepec masterplan, the initial brief asked for a “polyvalent” space with capacity for 400 people that could easily morph to stage an array of experimental theater, opera, and music. A rehearsal space and a cafeteria also needed to be part of the single-building design. To help counter the National Auditorium’s physical mass, Michan and his collaborators proposed something else: a garden dotted with discreet (and discrete) smaller buildings for the different functions. “It didn’t make sense to plant another large theater building on the site, so we split the program, which resulted in three pavilions for the three main requirements,” Michan told AN during a recent visit to the project. It was an inspired call: The choice to build light and unobtrusive is the Jardín Escénico’s most appealing quality. Another critical choice by the design team was to leave as much of the site unbuilt as possible, instead relying on skillful landscape design in which to embed the slender pavilions. “We wanted to diminish the boundaries between architecture and garden,” Michan said. “That gave us a road map: Using the existing dug-out earth found on-site, we could transform the site into a landscape of low hills and lakes. The resulting topography generates intimate pockets of space for outdoor activities while allowing us to impact existing ecosystems minimally and create a series of differentiated microenvironments.”
One of the main strategies employed was to diminish the boundaries between architecture and landscape. (Arturo Arrieta)
When one enters the Jardín, the three new buildings are invisible until the visitor glimpses their cantilevered, cream-colored roof coverings, which appear to be floating but are in fact supported on glass and concrete structures that rise out of inclined ground sections. What does immediately catch the eye is the skillful landscape design by Taller de Paisaje Entorno, which planted a variety of endemic plant species while preserving as many existing trees as possible. Artificial mounds made from soil excavated on-site articulate the space, create a small winding lake, and hide service and back-of-house areas. The graded terrain also produces auditive barriers, filtering out traffic noise—a necessity in the middle of one of the world’s largest cities.
A detail of the performance pavilion (Arturo Arrieta)
The main performance pavilion is a 12,055-square-foot versatile glass box that can be blacked out or—thanks to pivoting aluminum frames—opened to the gardens, depending on the event. “The idea is that during a performance the landscape is the silent backdrop,” Michan explained of the project’s poetic premise. But what gives the venue and its smaller rehearsal facsimile a few yards farther into the plot a distinct character is the roof design, the architecture’s most deliberate formal gesture. Flat on top, the coverings’ cantilevered underside mimics gently sloping dunes. (A tension between organic and hard-edged forms is a signature of all of Michan’s projects to date, mostly formally daring, materially expressive apartment buildings). But the coverings do not just perform aesthetically, they are also functional: Their elegantly inflated shape conceals lighting, sound, and other tech systems, allowing the theater’s interior to stay clear. Lastly, the roof overhangs also provide shade, cooling the AC-free buildings on hot days.
Resting on the glass boxes, the roof coverings—hollow cement shells wrapped around a steel structure—are, in essence, the only visible architecture. The rest of the building is conceived to vanish into the landscaping, an effect achieved by burying ancillary functions into the low hills at the edge of the footprint. Evocatively, the performance and rehearsal halls are accessed through tunnellike openings in the mounds, which produces a sense of entering an insulated cocoon to enjoy a play or sonata.
Pivoting aluminum frames allow the performance pavilion to open to the gardens (Arturo Arrieta)
The landscape is designed to change with time and the seasons. As in all of Taller de Paisaje Entorno’s landscape projects, the new garden in Chapultepec is meant to maintain itself and grow on its own, thus minimizing the amount of required care and resulting in a more natural appearance. As haphazardly exuberant as all the greenery can appear, especially after the summer months’ heavy rain, quasi-surgical precision went into the placement of the pavilions and paths to respect the existing vegetation.
A cafeteria concession, housed in a circular pavilion, opened recently. Here, as in the other buildings, the kitchen and service areas are tucked into the sloped perimeter, leaving the central space open for dining with panoramic views. The garden has clearly been embraced by locals of any age, who can be found relaxing on the verdant grounds at all hours. It also serves as an appealing practical axis connecting a busy metro station to, at the Jardín’s back end, an Orozco-designed bridge that leads to Chapultepec’s second main section. That said, the programming for the main performance pavilion—which is run by INBAL, Mexico’s National Institute for Fine Arts—seems to not be clearly defined yet. Occasional chamber concerts are announced the week before on the site’s social media. For a project that cost close to US$14 million, that seems like squandered potential, but it’s also not surprising in a country where funding for culture has been slashed as part of government austerity measures.
The flexible main performance pavilion is a glass box that can be blacked out or opened to the gardens. (Arturo Arrieta)
Still, the main draw of Jardín Escenico is its openness and the lightness of its buildings. Not only is most of the site given over to plants, trees, and inviting, expansive greenery accessible to anyone in need of a pause, but its main venue is effectively a hybrid of an open-air forum and a covered theater that visually blends into its surroundings. To build it, existing resources—namely, soil—and novel landscape design were integrated as material and functional elements of the scheme. That alone creates a new paradigm in a city that is setting standards for generous thought-out public infrastructure projects at an exemplary pace.
Suleman Anaya writes about architecture and culture for The New York Times Style Magazine, Aperture, Apartamento, and the Architectural Review, among other publications. He studied at London’s Architectural Association and is based in New York and Mexico City.
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