My Long-Held Grudge Against Mexico City’s Museo Soumaya

On my first visit to the Museo Soumaya—designed by Fernando Romero to harbor the disjointed art collection of his father-in-law Carlos Slim, at that time the richest man in the world—I was filled with the callow arrogance that characterizes first-year architecture students. It was the summer of 2011. The museum had recently opened in Mexico City to the public and to the sneers of a handful of my professors, who considered the amorphous building to be not only an egregious affront to the sacred doctrine of Form Follows Function, but an ode to mediocrity, vulgarity, and nepotism. Dressed in all black and believing myself the most sophisticated of nineteen-year-old intellectuals, I walked up the museum’s steps, making my way through a crowd of delighted tourists as they snapped photos of its garish silver facade.

I don’t remember much from that first visit, but in the years that followed, I would assure anyone who would listen that it was the most appalling piece of architecture I had ever come across. This was an unoriginal sentiment. Mocking the Museo Soumaya as a cr…