Central Library of UNAM, Mexico City

The Central Library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico is a plain ten-storey block that became one of the best-known images of modern Mexico because of what covers it. On all four sides, its windowless book tower is wrapped in a single mural of about 4,000 square metres, Historical Representation of Culture, designed by the painter and architect Juan O'Gorman. It is made not of paint but of small pieces of coloured stone gathered from different parts of Mexico, so that the colours are those of the rock itself and do not fade in the sun; only for the blues, which no stone gave him to his satisfaction, did O'Gorman turn to coloured glass.

Each façade tells a different part of the story. The north wall is given to the pre-Hispanic world, with Quetzalcóatl, Tláloc and the duality of life and death; the south wall to the colonial era, where the Ptolemaic and Copernican images of the cosmos appear side by side; the east wall to modern Mexico from the Revolution onwards; and the west wall to the university itself and its place in national culture. Seen from the broad lawns in front, the whole block reads like an illuminated codex turned into architecture, and it rewards walking all the way round and looking up close at the texture of the stones.

O'Gorman designed the building with the architects Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco; work on the design started in 1948, construction in 1950, and the library opened in April 1956. The closed tower was meant to keep the collections in stable conditions, while the whole building stands on a platform raised three metres above the ground. The library is part of the Central University City Campus of UNAM, the modernist campus inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2007, and it remains a working library with well over a million items.

Getting there

The library stands in Ciudad Universitaria, in the Coyoacán borough in the south of Mexico City, about 17 km from Mexico City Benito Juárez International Airport (MEX). Metro Line 3 runs to Universidad station, and Metrobús Line 1 stops at C.U. and Doctor Gálvez; from there the university's free Pumabús shuttles run past the library. The mural can be seen from the esplanade at any time.