Built
for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, The Camino Real Hotel not only not
only challenged the conventional standards of modern hotel design and
but consolidated Legorreta’s own characteristic architectural
style, but became a parallel modern art museum of sorts, a building
that perfectly embodied the optimism, creative effervescence and
aesthetic ambitions of Mexico in the sixties.
The
proposal offers an immersive reconstruction; a journey through
different periods, characters and key moments in the history of the
hotel, taking the original collaborations with artists and designers
such as Alexander Calder, Anni Albers, Lance Wyman, Mathias Goeritz,
Pedro Friedeberg, Armando Salas Portugal and Julius Shulman.
Through
historic photographs and documents, reproductions, original furniture
and a 1:75 scale model of the hotel commissioned for the exhibition
and created by Legorreta’s original model maker, as well as
contemporary approaches by artists like Mario García Torres and Lake
Verea, ARCHIVO(S) Hotel Camino Real attempts to rescue the original
spirit of the project and document the transformations the building
has gone through in recent decades.The ARCHIVO(S) series presents a
new approach to iconic projects of modern architecture in Mexico,
working on original archive materials in an open dialogue with
artists, designers and curators. Archivo will collaborate with
leading figures of contemporary culture to rebuild a new
architectural memory around landmarks of Mexican modernism, through
exhibition formats, public activations, reproductions of historical
materials, interventions and original design pieces.
A
proposal by Pablo León de la Barra, based on the project by Ricardo
Legorreta
With
collaborations by
Mathias
Goeritz, Luis Barragán, Alexander Calder, Anni Albers, Pedro
Friedeberg,Lance Wyman, Armando Salas Portugal, Julius Shulman,Sam
Peckinpah,Lily Nieto,Alberto Vivar,Carla Fernández,Lake Verea,
Claudia Fernández, Mario García Torres, Christoph Draeger
Archivo(s)
Hotel
Camino Real
February
4 – May 27 2016
