Located in Mexico City’s historic downtown — where one of the oldest Spanish cathedrals in the Americas rests atop the ceremonial center of the Aztec world — the Círculo Mexicano is housed in a 19th-century townhome that’s been transformed into a Shaker-inspired boutique hotel by the hotel developer Grupo Habita and our architecture firm, Ambrosi Etchegaray.
Círculo Mexicano is a project that makes an effort to adapt to new ways of life and contain the activities, businesses, and ideologies of the XXI century, in a property that rescues materials, memories, and conditions of different pasts.
At the same time, the project addresses the idea that a property with a vision of the future must stop conceiving heritage as something static -as if it were a relic - and understand that a carefully intervened and preserved heritage can modify the memory of those who surround it. This hotel relates to the idea of developing the city, where preserving a property does not mean keeping the facades standing, but rescuing entire structures to be reoccupied and inhabited with a new purpose.
Therefore, the project undertook to restore physical and material characteristics that are relevant at different historical moments and also links conditions and memories that give new meaning to the property, from events that took place in the house itself to the creation of associations that are considered as historical views of the citizens.
As an ode to Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the building’s former resident and one of Mexico’s most celebrated 20th-century photographers, the space makes a reference to the function of a traditional camera system, which can play with filters, frames, and light sources.
It also plays with the typologies found in Downtown Mexico City such as central, private and public courtyards. The hotel's private spaces surround the central courtyard on the entrance level, as if it were the street that goes all the way to the back of the building. The materiality of this level evokes the foundations and structures that remain as pre-Hispanic architecture in the subsoil. The black granite remains silent to allow the presence of a series of materials that are uncovered during the intervention.
Both private and public conditions are integrated into the interior of the rooms, framing the sky, allowing for natural light and ventilation, as well as playing with the experience of moving from the grand central courtyard into unexpected smaller courtyards that in turn filter the privacy of the hotel's corridors, hallways and public programs.
Inside the bedrooms, light bounces off white quarries; elements of vegetation, water, light, and the essential furniture participate in a game that invites us to reflect on the idea that less is enough.
Círculo Mexicano is a space within a different setting that seeks to encourage new encounters, returning attention to the visitor himself, to the natural environment, to the cathedral, to the street and to downtown Mexico City as a space rich in history and diversity.
Team:
Architects: Jorge Ambrosi, Gabriela Etchegaray
Collaborators: Ivo Martins, Sarah Tanguy
Customer: Habita Group
Builder: Construction Watchman
Furniture: the metropolitan
Landscape: Juan Acevedo/ Roof Plants
Lightning: Luca Salas Bassani Antivari
Branding: Deduce Design
Photographer: Sergio López
