A Living Temple

Mexico is itself a living museum. From 5,000 years ago until the Spanish conquest, its civilizations recognized their gods in the volcanoes and valleys that made their world a temple. To bring the gods closer, the Aztecs carved idols such as the rain god Tlaloc, whose 168-ton bulk now looms outside Mexico City's new National Museum of Anthropology (see color pages). The building itself reflects the autochthonous architecture of Mexico's landscape; it, too, is a living temple.

Mexico's elemental magic was skillfully woven into the museum by its architect, Pedro Ramirez Vaquez, 46, a team of 40 specialists, and hundreds of artists in wood and stone. Galleries surround an airy grand patio, roofed by an aluminum umbrella that keeps visitors dry in the season when Tlaloc works overtime. Like an upside-down fountain, a sun-stippled waterfall splashes freely onto the patio floor through the umbrella's center, veiling its only support, a bronze-covered column faced with modern interpretations of the rigid stylizations of pre-Hispanic imagery. Fire spurts from an abstract sculpture and reflects in a pond green with water plants. Even the museum's facade, of Tezontle volcanic rock, evokes the baked brown earth of Mexico. Though it already seems an indigenous part of its immemorial setting, the $13.6 million museum--designed and built in the incredible span of 19 months--opened only last year.

Goddess & Snakes. Ultimately, of course, a museum can only be as great as its contents. Mexico's century-old collection is one of the world's most comprehensive records of antiquity. Of more than 100,000 relics, two of the finest are the Coyolxauhqui, a 1,543-lb. moon goddess of jadeite whose grinning face is fringed with golden rattlesnakes, and a Western Hemisphere familiar, the 25-ton stone disk whose signs and symbols marked the hours and seasons and mapped the Aztec universe.

The museum has been laid out so that its 125,000 visitors a month can enjoy the nation's treasures and relate them to a past that in Mexico never seems remote. Every artifact on display has been mounted so that it remains a meaningful, individual object. Ancient Indian tribal music wafts softly through the 25 major galleries, each of which is a self-sufficient showcase of a different culture. Some 60 young women, scholars and linguists all, show visitors around. Views from the galleries lead the eye to the surrounding 2,223-acre Chapultepec park, where replicas of temples from each major period are placed like stage sets to dramatize the displays within.

Testimonial Trek. Some experts, anthropologists as well as architects, consider this an unusually great museum. "It is the best museum in the world," says U.S. Architect Philip Johnson, who has built many museums himself. It may well be. However, the most convincing testimonial comes from the thousands of Mexican villagers who trek there from all over the country to marvel at their heritage. And, as they linger around an inscrutable stone god or by a latticed temple, they, too, become part of Mexico's living museum.

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