Designed by Alfonso Ramírez Ponce and Inspired by the Work of Félix Candela: History of LAGO/ALGO Architecture in Mexico City

Mexico City is undoubtedly one of the most exciting and effervescent cities on the cultural and architectural scene in recent decades. Various authors have positioned it inside and outside the country through projects that make up a meeting platform for the creative community. LAGO/ALGO is part of the list of those resilient spaces that emerged from the pandemic, with the need to reimagine our current context by rethinking how we relate to the public and private space having the iconic Chapultepec Forest as a stage, an 810-hectare urban park that is divided into four sections which harbor some of the most important tourist sites in Mexico.

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In addition, the Bosque de Chapultepec has three artificial lakes, one of them faces this cultural space whose history dates back to 1964 by the director of works of Mexico City at that time, Leónides Guadarrama who commissioned the architect Alfonso Ramírez Ponce to design a restaurant on the lake following the trend of modernist innovation of architects such as Mies van de Rohe and Félix Candela (UNAM professor in Ramírez Ponce’s fourth-semester structure class), with this in mind he designed an immense asymmetric roof of concrete with a hyperbolic paraboloid shape.

To date, this building is an extraordinary testament to the fact that, in the words of Ramírez Ponce, “architectural structures resistant to weight are a clumsy accumulation of matter… There is nothing more noble from an intellectual point of view than to resist by form”. With this in mind, we restored the architectural splendor of the building’s original structure in collaboration with Naso architecture studio. Congruently, we gave a new intention to the iconic restaurant and generated a cultural program that complements it, which we call ALGO.
– LAGO/ALGO

LAGO/ALGO is an autonomous and independent project, conceived as a platform for encounters with nature, art, culture, the history of modern architecture, and sustainable cuisine made from local Mexican ingredients and flavors. The principles that built it are to reconsider consumption models and our relationship with nature, recover an emblematic building and open it to the public through art and culture, and break down the walls that separate us to rediscover an icon of modern architecture from the sixties.

Over the years, the building underwent multiple modifications, with several interventions that altered the original design. Currently, the Naso architecture studio sought to continue the restoration of the building to restore its splendor.

The main objective of our architectural design was to understand the original project and its different modifications to transform the building into a public gallery and a restaurant. Our approach was to develop a plan that would showcase the original structure of the building to integrate different open spaces that could provide the flexibility required for the building to harbor different types of exhibitions.
– Naso

This architectural intervention grants nobility to the space so that a workspace, a cafe, and a restaurant that is aware of the origin of its products and processes can coexist. The restaurant, led by Micaela Miguel, is a sustainable fishing market that seeks to bring the farm to the table to, over time, contribute to redesigning the food chain and generating value for all its stakeholders. For its part, ALGO is a free-access cultural space led by OMR: a hybrid and collaborative project that, through culture and the arts, seeks to generate existential reflections on contemporaneity and our role in the future of the earth.

The story does not end here, because remember that there is a happy ending. Time passed slowly, and once again, suddenly, by chance of his already random fate, other hands, these skillful and generous ones, rescued him, healed his wounds and decided to restore his original form. They returned the lost wing and enriched his plumage with different shades. Our protagonist, grateful, turned his head, saw his mother and his saviors, and went back into space, traced its unprecedented geometries and observed, once again, the moon and his own image reflected in the mirror of the crystal lake.
– PhD in Architecture José Alfonso Ramírez Ponce on the restoration of the building.

The future mission of this space, which a few months after its opening, is already positioned as one of the most important cultural spaces in Mexico City, is to be an agent for the preservation and regeneration of the Bosque de Chapultepec ecosystem and an inclusive space for all public. The commitment focuses on the biodiversity of the park in coexistence with its users.

The cultural center is open to the public from Wednesday to Saturday in a schedule of 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The restaurant is serving Monday to Sunday in a schedule of 8:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. in Bosque de Chapultepec, Pista El Sope S/N, 2nd Section, Miguel Hidalgo, 11560. Mexico City, CDMX. For more information visit LAGO/ALGO.