A three-sided 57-story skyscraper on Paseo de la Reforma Avenue in Mexico City overlooks the 686-hectare Chapultepec Park. Around it, a metropolitan area bursting with growth and seamless vegetation features several high-standing modern buildings.
Along the wide Paseo de la Reforma Avenue, a 246-metre-high building stands with some sort of magnificence as if to depict Mexico City’s status as a hub of architectural activity. LBR + A, led by Architect Benjamin Romano, designed Torre Reforma to be a unique kind of tower.
In a neighborhood with so much diversity and containing the largest city park in the Western Hemisphere, Torre Reforma is now the tallest building in the city – at least until Torre KOI, a new 280-meter-high skyscraper – is completed.
The lead architect, Romano, insinuates that this is only the beginning of skyscrapers in the city. With 89,000 square meters of floor area, the project is a mixed-use development built for offices and retail. The architects employed clusters in their design.
It was divided into 14 four-story clusters to emphasize the idea of having a building within a building. Each cluster has its own interior garden to foster the vertical garden ideas seen mostly in Jean Nouvel and Vo Trong Nghia’s projects.
The building’s footprint is only 2,800 square meters. Its sculptural shape was informed by several factors, including environmental sustainability, according to the architects.
Two concrete walls meet to form a sharp edge. The top of the tower has been chamfered to satisfactorily finish a great sculpture by emphasizing the top triangular plane. The architects cut slits on the concrete facades to light up the gardens with natural daylight.
Inspired by pre-Hispanic and Colonial Mexican architecture, when solid materials were very common, the architects used concrete designed to bend slightly during an earthquake, considering Mexico City’s proneness to earthquakes.
The mechanism that allows the concrete walls to bend without breaking in periods of stress is enhanced by the presence of triple-height windows (located on every four stories) that dissipate seismic energy.
On the third elevation, a double-layered glass wall with a metal diagrid rises every four stories, with open-air terraces and glass balconies. The glass wall is asymmetrical and slightly bent at the center, adding a bit of unpredictability to a tower whose two facades are clean, symmetrical concrete planes.
The glass façade features horizontal sun-shading elements that protect the interiors from the sun’s heat during the day. The building’s envelope and structure allow for column-free interior space, which provides users with very flexible interior spaces.
This project was also as much a conservation project as it was a mixed-use development. On-site, a property built in 1929 was integrated into the tower’s design to form part of the main lobby. To accommodate both the tower and the old historic house, the architects moved the house to provide a new foundation and then put the house back in place without any destruction.
The historic house was restored to recover its urban value, serving as a transition from a small scale at pedestrian level to a high-rise building scale.
Aside from office and retail spaces, Torre Reforma offers sports facilities, restaurants, bars, and several meeting rooms. On the ground floor, LBR + A ensured that street activity continued and opened into the building.
A system to recycle rain and wastewater was incorporated into the project, which has since earned LEED Platinum pre-certification from the US Green Building Council for its core and shell design.
Project Information
Architects: LBR + A
Lead Architect: Benjamin Romano
Structural design: ARUP New York
Location: Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City, Mexico
Photography: Alfonso Merchand
