Museo Soumaya, Plaza Carso
Hexagon-tiled private art museum in Nuevo Polanco holding the Carlos Slim Foundation collection.
Museo Soumaya is the museum of the Carlos Slim Foundation, named after Soumaya Domit. It first opened in 1994 in converted industrial buildings at Plaza Loreto in San Angel. The much larger Plaza Carso building, in the redeveloped Nuevo Polanco district, opened in March 2011. Admission has always been free, and the two sites together present a collection of some 66,000 works spanning around thirty centuries.
The Plaza Carso building is a windowless, twisting volume 46 metres high, clad in about 16,000 hexagonal aluminium tiles on a steel frame of curved columns. Six floors are reached by a ramp that spirals up the interior; the top gallery is lit through a suspended ceiling and houses the largest holding of Auguste Rodin sculpture outside France, alongside works by Dali, Degas and Renoir. Lower floors cover European old masters, colonial and nineteenth-century Mexican art, and Mesoamerican pieces.
Highlights
- Windowless facade of roughly 16,000 hexagonal aluminium tiles
- Spiral ramp rising through six galleries to a top-lit hall
- The largest collection of Rodin sculpture outside France
- Twenty centuries of art in Mexico, from Mesoamerica to the avant-garde
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