Museo Jumex

Museo Jumex is Mexico's most important contemporary art museum — a sawtooth-roofed building designed by British architect David Chipperfield that sits next to the Museo Soumaya in Polanco and houses the collection of Eugenio López Alonso, heir to the Jumex juice fortune and Latin America's most significant contemporary art collector.

The building is the anti-Soumaya — where Soumaya is curved, shimmering, and attention-seeking, Jumex is rectangular, travertine-clad, and quietly confident. Chipperfield's design uses a series of triangular skylights (the sawtooth roof) to flood the upper galleries with diffused natural light, creating exhibition conditions that rival any museum in the world. The building is small by museum standards (4,000 square metres of gallery space), but the restraint of the architecture allows the art to command full attention.

The collection includes over 3,000 works by artists including Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Cy Twombly, Gabriel Orozco, and Andy Warhol, and the temporary exhibition programme — curated with a sophistication that has earned Jumex comparisons to the Guggenheim and the New Museum — brings major international shows to Mexico City. The ground-floor café, with its terrace overlooking the plaza shared with Soumaya, is an excellent place to sit and contemplate the architectural conversation between Chipperfield's restrained modernism and Romero's exuberant futurism — two buildings that couldn't look more different but that together have made this corner of Polanco one of the most interesting museum districts in the Americas.