Museo Soumaya

The Museo Soumaya is a private art museum in Mexico City. It has two buildings: Plaza Loreto, opened in 1994, and Plaza Carso, opened in 2011. Plaza Carso is the one famous for its looks, a tower covered in shiny hexagon tiles. The museum holds more than 66,000 works from 30 centuries of art, and it is one of the most visited art museums in Mexico.

The museum is named after Soumaya Domit, who died in 1999 and was the wife of its founder, the businessman Carlos Slim. It welcomed about 1,095,000 visitors in 2013, which made it the most visited art museum in Mexico. In October 2015 it greeted its five millionth visitor. The Plaza Carso building was designed by Fernando Romero, who is Slim's son-in-law.

What's inside

Most of the art is European from the 15th to the 20th centuries, along with Mexican art, religious items and historical documents. The museum has the world's largest collection of pre-Hispanic and colonial-era coins. It also owns the largest collection of casts of Auguste Rodin's sculptures outside France, about 380 works. Artists on display include Dalí, Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir and Rivera.

The shiny building

The Plaza Carso museum is a six-storey building 46 metres tall, covered by about 16,000 hexagonal aluminium tiles. Romero designed it with the engineers at Ove Arup and with Frank Gehry, and it cost about 70 million US dollars. It has a narrow entrance that opens into a large white gallery, and the top floor lets in daylight.

The building also holds a library, a restaurant and an auditorium.

The first building and its name

The first museum building, Plaza Loreto, stands in the San Ángel area on the site of an old mill by the Magdalena river. The mill later became a paper factory and was damaged by fires in 1905 and the 1980s. The company Grupo Carso then turned the ruins into the museum, which was officially founded in 1994.

On the globe

The model shows the twisted, windowless museum covered in hexagon tiles. Look for the narrow waist.