Architect Tatiana Bilbao has revealed visuals of a major new aquarium she is building on the Mexican coastline, which is designed to look like a ruin or a shipwreck.
Construction of the Mazatlán Aquarium began in the Mexican city in 2017 and is due to complete in 2021. It is being built as part of a 30-hectare public park fronting the beach.
The building is planned as an open grid, which will loosely divide the aquarium's interior into different sections. Each area will be assigned to a different type of marine ecosystem: open sea, coast, land and forest.
The building will have monumental concrete walls, draped with indigenous plants and vines. Some of these walls will extend beyond the building volume, which will reinforce the idea of the building as a ruin.
"It's a place where the sea and terrestrial nature encounters architecture and human world," said Tatiana Bilbao Estudio.
"Nature lives and grows on the interior and exterior of the building, giving identity to the project, belonging to the place, and converting the experience into to something complete and unique," added the studio.
The building will have three storeys. The main entrance will be on the first floor, alongside the majority of exhibition spaces. Conservation and education facilities will be located on the ground floor, while service areas will be located on the upper level.
A large public plaza will function as the building's main entrance.
"The idea of this project is to offer the complete experience of the oceans and shore ecosystems of the Sea of Cortes," added the studio.
The Mazatlán Aquarium is one of several new projects that feature in Bilbao's retrospective exhibition at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen.
The show includes a small concrete model of the entire building and a one-to-one-scale mockup of one section. It also features a number of collages that Bilbao's team produced during the design stages.
In a recent interview with Dezeen, Bilbao said that she refuses to produce computer visualisations of designs still in progress. She prefers to produce collages, as they leave space for collaboration and imagination.
The only visualisation of the Mazatlán Aquarium was produced once the design was finalised.
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