In 1934, Diego Rivera installed a vast mural in Mexico City’s Palacio de las Bellas Artes depicting a man operating a massive machine that draws in the vastness of the cosmos, the mysteries of human biology, and the battling ideologies of the young 20th century—the sum of human knowledge and experience concentrated in a pair of heavy, gloved hands. Rivera’s work, titled Man, Controller of the Universe, came immediately to mind for the architect Tatiana Bilbao when the hotelier Ernesto Coppel Kelly asked her to design an aquarium in the resort town of Mazatlán on Mexico’s northern Pacific coast. “What worries me about aquariums is how they reinforce the idea that man dominates nature,” Bilbao says. “The question became, ‘How do we make a building that becomes a point of contact between human beings and a part of the ecosystem that we can’t normally access?’”

The aquarium’s cast-in-place concrete facades are tinted violet (1 & 2). Among its exhibits is a large coral tank (3). Photos © Iwan Baan, click to enlarge.