murMURO

type: cultural building
location: Tulum, Mexico
year: 2006
client: INAH
status: competition submission
project team: Mariano Arias-Diez, Francisco Villeda,
Martha Ceron, Henry Quiroga

BRIEF:
The parallel development of two concepts, generate a project which conjugates, like the pre-hispanic cities, respect of the historic heritage and on the other side, questions the role of the social-cultural factors that shape the contemporary space.

The two concepts:

1.[stone = wall = structure = ornament]
The prehispanic building is a synthesis of a constructive method, function and form.
Contain, live and flaunt. Our new museum has to have that characteristic, get close to the monumental simplicity of a constructive functional and decorative gesture for the new needs.

2. [cultural tourism = mass tourism]
Can we combine two different ideas on tourism in a way that both benefit?
Why "respect a monument" means "do not touch it"?
Create a mass-cultural tourism model in a landscape optimal for it.
Can we generate a new development strategy for the archeological sites? intervene and operate & maintain and restore.

We start from the pre-Hispanic city founded on an exceptional site. If we recall the mechanism and development of ancient cities we will see that generation after generation, its "modernization" was always based on the previously built.
Layer after layer, the new town was shaping, adapting to new needs and its natural context.

Tulum still has the social life that had in its glory times. Modern tourists are the new inhabitants of these cities, masses or not, they make the old city not to fall far from the inevitable changes of a big contemporary city.

Always revitalized, Tulum requires us to follow its historical development, create today a new historical layer to define new uses and functions, but, as previously happened, using the foundation in which it rose, remarking an ancient greatness and pointing toward a contemporary future.

A site museum, that as a contemporary "wisper" (murMURO), gets stronger of what it exists, the history, the site, the masses.