Inn Bloom
Inn Bloom is a floral architectural installation for Abierto Mexicano de Diseño 2018, set within Alameda Central, a public park believed by many to be the oldest planned urban green space in the Americas. It reinterprets the traditional British inn and combines it with rich elements of Mexican visual culture and abstracted historic architectural forms to portray moments in the park’s history.
Studio MUTT were selected by the British Council to design a pavilion for Abierto Mexicano de Diseño 2018, responding to the festival theme of locality. The festival took place from 10-14 October 2018 and Studio MUTT were invited to Mexico City to contribute to a programme of events and talks alongside the pavilion.
Inn Bloom is a floral architectural installation set within Alameda Central, a public park believed by many to be the oldest planned urban green space in the Americas. It reinterprets the traditional British Inn - a domestic scale community gathering space that also provided food and board to travellers - and combines it with rich elements of Mexican visual culture and abstracted historic architectural forms to portray moments in the park’s history.
The pavilion offers a shaded space for people to dwell and pause while also inviting elements of traditional Mexican street culture. Inn Bloom resembles a single storey house, elevated above the park, defining a public space and encouraging activity within it. Domestic-urban, public-private, the Inn is a contradictory and blurred space that questions the relationship between public and private worlds.
The park was designed as a French inspired Beaux-Arts landscape, completed during an era of Spanish rule, with Greco Roman monuments, French Gothic seating and German sculptures of Beethoven. It is a landscape of exchange. Although the original, sometimes negative circumstances in which these objects came to reside in Mexico could be historically questionable, the park now stands as an embodiment of the potential of openness between diverse cultures. Playing on this rich history of international cultural exchange, Inn Bloom is a temporary British contribution from Studio MUTT. It is a dialogue between Mexican and British cultures, referencing elements of both to create a fun and contradictory architectural installation.
