History

The Palacio de Bellas Artes belongs to two eras. Construction began on 1 October 1904 to a design by the Italian architect Adamo Boari, who envisioned a sumptuous theatre in an Art Nouveau and Neoclassical idiom, clad in white Carrara marble. The project stalled: engineering trouble with the marshy subsoil, the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, and Boari’s departure left the shell unfinished for two decades. Work resumed in the late 1920s under the Mexican architect Federico Mariscal, who completed the building in 1934 and gave its interior an emphatically Art Déco treatment. Since its inauguration the heavy structure has sunk roughly four metres into the lakebed.

While the theatre waited, the city expanded westward. The Colonia Condesa had been formally established in 1902, and in 1910 Porfirio Díaz himself inaugurated a private racetrack run by the Jockey Club Mexicano. The Revolution closed the track, and during a 1920s planning phase its grounds were reorganised around a new public park. Avenida Amsterdam still traces the oval of the old course. The surrounding Colonia Hipódromo filled with apartment blocks through the 1930s, a decade when Art Déco was the fashionable language of the rising middle class.

Downtown, the same years produced the Edificio La Nacional, built between 1929 and 1932 by Manuel Ortiz Monasterio for the Compañía Nacional de Seguros. At 56 metres and thirteen storeys it is considered the first building in Mexico City to exceed ten floors, a steel-framed Déco tower facing Bellas Artes that held the title of tallest in the city until 1937.