M.N.ROY is a project made as an open question, the one has for goal not to answer obviously what's actually the M.N.ROY.
In this way, the place can be perceived as an anti-project of what could be the commission of a private club in Mexico City, an more precisely in its Roma neighborhood.
In fact Roma has been very important in the definition of the architectural identity of this space, located in a very dueling neighborhood, and responding on one hand to its past, the one of the high mexican bourgeoisie of Porfirio Diaz (Mexican dictator 1876 – 1911) time which abandoned the neighborhood after the 1985 earthquake; and the today's reality of a trendy urban area that Roma became. The club is the expression a high singular personality settling in the strong left over of its past time.
According to this, where normally the renovation of the facade appears to be the starting point, the opposite was done : letting the facade untouched to increase the rupture between the original meaning of the house and the redefinition of it.
We kept the house as a testimony of what it was, the house where Manabendra Nath Roy founded the first clandestine Mexican communist party.
By not touching the facade we made paradoxically appealing the building from outside, stimulating the curiosity of the people passing by and seeing a large queue trying to enter an almost ruin house.
Once inside, we made another step in a schizophrenic architectural way, introducing a new language ,deeply belonging to the mexican culture, and nevertheless completely stranger to the Porfirio Diaz architecture time.
We used a pre-hispanic language reminiscence inside, in a participative way and not contemplative as could be a nostalgic neo pre-hispanic vision of it, introducing new materials (copper, leather, wood, volcanic stone), geometries (puuc art, maya arch, pyramids), and everything, down impressive generous volumes.
M.N.ROY is the impossible mix of cultures, volumes, architectural styles, making possible an improbable modern space of melting pot.
