The Museo Tamayo was built by Teodoro González de León and Abraham Zabludovsky between 1979 and 1981 to house the international art collection of Olga and Rufino Tamayo and to contribute to positioning Mexico within the dialogue of contemporary art on a global scale. It is precisely in the synthesis between built form, environment, and cultural context that a cosmotechnic approach finds its relevance.

Cosmotechnics is a contemporary concept introduced by philosopher Yuk Hui that refers to the unification of the moral order (a system of principles and values) and the cosmic order (nature) through technics. Architecture, in a cosmotechnic sense, translates the ways in which we understand our place in the cosmos through the design and incorporation of materials and construction systems, as well as the adaptation to the surrounding environment through composition and siting.

Forty-five years after the opening of the Museo Tamayo and one hundred years after the birth of one of its architects, Teodoro González de León, this reading revisits the significance of a work that brought together knowledge from different historical moments and cultures, resulting in the materialization of a singular worldview. The museum, understood through its cosmotechnics, concentrates the influence of modern architecture, Brutalism, and the development of a distinctive materiality rooted in the Mexican urban imaginary through hammered concrete. It likewise incorporates a pre-Hispanic heritage in its treatment of scale and modular structure, which, together with its stepped roofs at varying heights and its exterior slopes, evoke a pyramid emerging from the Bosque de Chapultepec as an extension of the landscape and the surrounding vegetation.

By suggesting the existence of multiple cosmotechnics, we can approach the discourse on universality that Rufino Tamayo himself grounded in his aesthetic project and his vision of art. It should be noted that the modern idea of the universality of technics —that which conceives of the world as a reserve of resources available for exploitation— has been misunderstood and reduced to a single Western framework imposed upon the rest of the world, a position that rests on a fallacious premise: the apparent existence of a single way of relating to the cosmos. In this way, in a search to recognize within design and constructive knowledge a cosmological and cultural dimension, the Museo Tamayo offers us today a journey through a structure whose technical and spatial integration preserves the memory of other ways of inhabiting the world.

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Curated by: Luis Eguiarte

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Image credit:
Julius Shulman, exterior del Museo Tamayo, 1981. ©️ J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10).