The Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros is a cultural, political and social facility located in Mexico City as part of the World Trade Center Mexico City. It was designed and decorated by David Alfaro Siqueiros in the 1960s and hosts the largest mural work in the world called La Marcha de la Humanidad. The building has a theatre, galleries and more, but the main focus is the Forum Universal, which contains the interior portion of Siqueiros' mural work. Visitors can experience the mural while standing on a rotating stage, listening to Siqueiros narrate.
Site
The Polyforum is a decagon shaped construction with different exhibition spaces that feature David Alfaro Siqueiros' work. The building is part of a business complex called the World Trade Center Mexico City in the Benito Juárez borough of Mexico City. This complex was designed by architects Joaquín Alvarez, Guillermo Rossel de la Lama and Ramón Mikelajáuregui, and built just outside Parque de la Lama, but the Polyforum was designed and decorated by Siqueiros, who nicknamed it "El coronelazo." The exterior is in the form of a diamond and the inside has eight sides. The building with its murals is considered to be an "artistic heritage site" for Mexico, registered by the Centro Nacional de Conservación, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura and Registro del Patrimonio Artístico Mueble. The Polyforum is a multiple event facility dedicated to cultural, political and social events. Its main aspects include a 500-seat theatre, two galleries, offices and the Foro Universal or Universal Forum. The outside wall was built in 1970 as a way for patron Manuel Suárez to prevent encroachment or destruction of his property. The wall became immediately controversial because although it was built for safety purposes, it obstructed the view of the Polyforum for passersby, thus making it less accessible to the general public. The press allegedly deemed the wall defensive and antisocial, and Siqueiros tried to defend the wall by saying that it was merely an aesthetic extension of the Polyforum itself. Made into a work of art, the inner surface of the wall celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Mexican mural movement of which Siqueiros actively participated in with Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and others. The mural prominently features portraits of Rivera and Orozco, as well as Dr. Atl, a key figure in the start of the mural movement, and graphic artists Guadalupe Posada and Leopoldo Mendez. The Polyforum's exterior, a 2,750 ft. area, features a twelve-faced sculptural mural painting. Each face depicts a different symbolic concept. The twelve concepts depicted are: Destiny, Ecology, Acrobats, Masses, Decalog, Christ, Indigenous Peoples, Dance, Mythology, Mingling of Races, Music, and Atom. The exterior work is meant to serve as a preview of the interior mural, to entice visitors to enter the building, and to make visitors contemplate the complex meanings of the concepts represented.
Political climate The year 1960 marked the fiftieth year of the Mexican Revolution, and the political situation in Mexico during the 1960s was quite grim. The early 1960s was marked by major control by the Left and attempts to create class equality, but these attempts unfortunately failed. In 1964, the combination of both an economic decline and an announcement that allottable land was near exhaustion led many peasants to revolt. In the late 1960s, the Right gained control, which led to many doctor and student strikes that were received with strong resistance from the government. The most shocking example of the murky political situation in 1960s Mexico happened in the form of the Tlatelolco Massacre on October 2, 1968. During a student demonstration that happened ten days before the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, police and military officers shot into a crowd of unarmed students at Tlatelolco Plaza. The final death toll remains a mystery, but it has been reported that four students died, twenty were wounded, and thousands were beaten, jailed, and disappeared. This event coincided with the intended opening of the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros during the summer of 1968, and demonstrates how turbulent the political climate was in Mexico during the Polyforum's construction.
Mexico 2000 The Polyforum was designed as part of a major redevelopment/improvement project for Mexico City entitled Mexico 2000. Because of an increase in Mexico City's urban population, Mexico 2000 strived to generate income for the city through tourism and services at its decentralized location at Parque de la Lama. In addition to making arts more accessible to people through Siqueiros’ work at the Polyforum, some of the other contributions of Mexico 2000 included underground networks of driveways, closed circuit radio and television broadcasting, a new system of construction called “Tridilosa” that lightened the weight of the building structure as to allow for more rooms to be created, and expedited travel services for tourists coming into the city. The plaza's major hotel, “El Hotel de Mexico,” is 730 foot high building that was designed to house a large number of tourists. At the time, the hotel was the tallest reinforced concrete and earthquake-resistant building in the world, and featured 1,512 rooms and suites with a variety of dining options. Equally important to tourism as the Polyforum, “El Hotel de Mexico” was built for both functionality and aesthetic pleasure through its architectural grandeur.
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