Toward the turn of the 20th century, the world’s fair as galvanizing cultural phenomenon had long been capturing the collective imagination, while its more demure cousin, the regional expo, busily proliferated in its shadow. It, too, left enduring artifacts in its wake. The fanciful cast-iron and glass structure that today houses the Chopo Museum in Mexico City, which Mexico- and New York–based TEN Arquitectos recently renovated and expanded, is one of these vestiges.
Designed by German architect Bruno Möhring, who was known for the Art Nouveau bridges and stations he created for Berlin’s elevated tramway, the building was constructed in Oberhausen, Germany, as a pavilion for the 1902 Exhibition of Art and Textile Industry in Düsseldorf. Upon the conclusion of the fair, the Mexican Company of Permanent Exhibitions acquired three of the building’s four halls. They were dismantled, shipped, and reassembled using locally sourced masonry in Santa María la Ribera — at the time a fashionable residential neighborhood in Mexico City — where the structure soon earned the moniker the Crystal Palace because of its resemblance to Sir Joseph Paxton’s hall for London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1913 the building became the home of the National Museum of Natural History, but by 1964 deterioration led to its closing. It remained abandoned until 1973, when the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) rehabilitated it and, a couple of years later, inaugurated it as the Chopo Museum (named after its street, Chopo, or “Poplar”), a center for experimental art and avant-garde performance. In 2004 the university initiated the process of updating and expanding the institution.
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