Concert Hall Foro Boca

Veracruz is something of a mythic city: early landfall for Cortes and his band of conquistadores; the point of embarkation from Mexico of its precious gold and silver; pirates and mercenaries galore; even a namecheck in Apollinaire’s Surrealist visual poem, Lettre-Océan. This port city sits on the low-lying eastern shore of the Mexican isthmus looking out across the Caribbean, to Europe and to Africa. Now it has also a bold work of architecture from the new generation of Mexican architects, a building that reifies and takes deliberate advantage of its littoral condition. A building on the edge of a continent. Boca Del Río is the southern extension to Veracruz. It is a modern, middle-class city with condominiums sprouting up to benefit from the panoramic view and with one unique topographical feature: the decanting of a broad sluggish river, between concrete embankments and breakwaters, out into the ocean. This is the site for Michel Rojkind’s latest innovative project, the latest in a family of structures - in Mexico City, Querétaro, and Monterrey - characterized by distinctive morphology and by geometric detail that verges on the ornamental. Rojkind made his name as a drummer in a New Wave band, and it is tempting to identify in his architectural work an energy and a sociability that may also have infected his musical career. Foro Boca is a concert hall built to accommodate the new Philharmonic Orchestra of Boca Del Río. It is deliberately sited at the river mouth giving the municipality its name; and its name, Foro Boca, signals in turn an intention for this new facility to function as a forum for the neighborhood as Boca Del Río evolves into a thriving urban entity. Rojkind and his team have responded by providing both a signature landmark - a sculptural stacking of polygonal forms, visible from up and down the coast - and a complex interior landscape linking the seafront promenade, via internal terraces and...

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