Anahuacalli

Diego Rivera built Anahuacalli as a volcanic-stone temple for the pre-Hispanic objects he spent his life collecting. Begun around 1941 with architect Juan O’Gorman, it is no neutral museum box: its talud-tablero geometry and dark local rock make it read as a modern pyramid rising from an old lava field.

Inside, the route is part of the work. Rivera planned the galleries around three levels of Mexica cosmogony: the underworld, the terrestrial world and a supramundane level. Moving through them, you encounter pieces from a collection listed at roughly 60,000 pre-Hispanic objects, now joined, since March 2026, by the collection of Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera.

The most revealing pause is the central, light-filled studio, where sixteen of Rivera’s mural sketches are shown. A 2016 expansion by Mauricio Rocha added new exhibition and programme spaces without breaking the building’s relationship with the lava landscape; the project won the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) in 2023.