Mexico City’s urban fabric is the living image of an event that changed the world: the first contact between the Spanish Empire and the largest civilization of the ancient American continent, the Aztec Empire. During the process of colonization, Spanish conquistadors built Catholic churches on top of indigenous temples. The epitome of this superimposition is the Metropolitan Cathedral, built with stones dismantled from the Templo Mayor—the place par excellence of Aztec rituals—and erected on top of the once sacred “Pyramid of the Sun.” This act of superimposition and hybridization defined a unique condition that has characterized Mexican architecture over the following centuries.

The “National Museum of Architecture of Mexico” takes as a concept this condition of Mexican architecture. It is a spatial reinterpretation of the diversity of its architectural styles, superimposed on each other, resulting in a succession of spaces that materialize a complex and violent history of conquests, impositions, and hybridizations. The museum itself is a living display of these contested stories, establishing a dialogue between the architecture of the past, present and future, and becoming a hybrid of all the above. The resulting hybrid space is thus conceived as an experiment in typological juxtaposition and superimposition.

Wandering through the museum becomes an everchanging and spontaneous experience, in which users create their own narrative by discovering each of the hybrid architectonic types. The spaces themselves are not chronologically related to the exhibition they house, generating tensions and contradictions: an exhibition of contemporary architecture inside a medieval cathedral, Aztec architecture represented inside a modern space, the underworld of water channels emerging in the Exhibition halls; thus reinforcing the infinite act of hybridization and superimposition that characterizes Mexican architecture.