Remnants of a Retreating Sea
The outside of Gran Acuario de Mazatlán, a new aquarium in northern Mexico (image: courtesy of Juan Manuel McGrath).
As an adolescent growing up in the Baltimore suburbs – in what devotees of The Wire might know as “the County” (pronounced “canny”) – I would make the 30-minute drive into the city maybe twice a month to go to dinner or museums with my family, to go to the symphony or the theatre or the arthouse cinema down on Charles Street. But as a child, I equated Baltimore with the National Aquarium.
Baltimore’s aquarium is probably the closest thing the city has to a bona fide tourist attraction, alongside Fort McHenry, whose bombardment by the British in the War of 1812 inspired Francis Scott Key to write ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, and the Orioles Stadium at Camden Yards, where it is routinely butchered. Inaugurated in 1981 and expanded in 1990 after its staggering early success, the aquarium’s main buildings, as I knew them, jutted brightly into the harbour on a sequence of piers, their oblique pyramidal rooflines gliding out onto the mud-coloured surface of the Patapsco River. (Another building, dedicated to the Australian Outback, opened in 2005.) Sea lions cavorted in a pool near the entrance. Inside, right by the ticket counter (and, if memory serves, the gift shop), a sequence of transparent pillars transported bubbles from the floor to the ceiling like a set of pneumatic tubes at a drive-through bank teller. The moment my parents and I entered, I would throw my arms around the columns and press my ear to the glass (or was it plexiglass?), listening to the guttural, gurgling rush of air through water.
Gran acuario de Mazatlán is solely dedicated to local ecosystems (image: courtesy of Juan Manuel Mcgrath).
Tickets in hand, we moved from that transitional space into the high, ecclesiastical darkness of the building’s central atrium – a towering void traversed by concrete pathways that crossed the empty space at shallow angles. At ground level, manta rays glided through an open pool that sunk deep into the ground. Down there, below us, and up ahead, tucked into a labyrinth of dark halls and byzantine pathways, there were puffins and poison dart frogs, threshers and hammerheads; in the glass pyramid that surmounted the second building, lianas and bromeliads steamed in a balmy patch of misplaced rainforest – a composite fantasy, really, unlike any actual rainforest I’ve had the chance to visit since – with piranha tanks encased in artificial stones. There was also a famous dolphin show – since discontinued, thank god – complete with the usual, ethically abhorrent (though I didn’t know that at the time) tricks, and wave-shaped curtains that rose and fell on a staggering view over the harbour, where the Chesapeake Bay ends. There were also, somehow, traveling exhibitions, like a miraculous show on jellyfish that ran from 1996-1998, on loan from Boston’s New England Aquarium, that’s still imprinted on my memory almost 30 years after I first saw it. All those amorphous figures (clouds at sunset, liquid opals) gliding through empty space felt, still feel, like the closest I’ll ever get to outer space.
I loved the aquarium. There is a very good chance that I will never go back.
The inside of Gran acuario de Mazatlán (image: courtesy of Juan Manuel Mcgrath).
In May of this year, I traveled from my home in Mexico City to see an entirely different aquarium, the newly opened Gran Acuario de Mazatlán in the northern state of Sinaloa – the largest of its kind in Latin America – designed by Mexico City’s Tatiana Bilbao Studio. Mazatlán is a beachside city known, in no particular order, for its 21km-long seaside promenade, or malecón; its spectacular seafood (giant clams hoisted live out of plastic coolers, raw scallops so fresh they’re not even served cold, crab tostadas, oysters and glistening plates of aguachile); and the activities of the Sinaloa Cartel. Mazatlán’s economy is based largely in fishing and tourism, much of it local. (The Mexican navy also maintains an important presence in the city.) Recent years have seen a rash of real estate speculation as well, particularly at the northern end of the malecón, where newly built apartment towers loom over the water in an urban landscape that is otherwise dominated by one- or two storey houses and broad, pin-straight streets.
Before working on the aquarium, Bilbao – who is the principal at her eponymous studio and one of Mexico’s most prominent contemporary builders – had spent two years in Mazatlán developing and executing a massive urban design project for a new Central Park (the city’s name for it), built around a retention pond that previous administrations had failed to convert into a recreational space. “They’d tried to protect it in various ways,” Bilbao told me on the afternoon that we met at her Mexico City offices, a couple of days before my visit to Mazatlán. “They’d put in some basketball courts and moved a couple of trees and put in some plants, but they’d never succeeded in making it live up to its name.” When Bilbao’s office started working on the project in 2015, she says, “we wanted to understand the hydraulic issues of the city, the ecological issues, to understand the park not just as a hydraulic system, but also as an ecological system.” The office’s plans began with cleaning the pond (all those tall new buildings, which separate the park from the sea, had a bad habit of dumping their sewage there) and organising the 30.6-hectare area around permeable surfaces and hardscapes that would adapt to changing water levels. “For us, it was very important for the intervention to become a medium through which to understand the ecosystem,” Bilbao told me, “not a boundary separating us from it.” In the process of cleaning the lagoon, says Alba Cortés, a partner in the studio and project manager for the aquarium, the team had to remove four crocodiles deposited there by former owners who’d bought them as pets and gave them up when they became prohibitively large and threatening: a pithy little metaphor for 21st-century humanity’s radical, almost comical disconnection from the fundamental logic of the natural world.
“What worries me a great deal about aquariums is that way of thought, that Man Dominates Nature.”
While the park was underway, its primary sponsor, the flamboyant entrepreneur and hotelier, Ernesto Coppel Kelly, commissioned another firm to intervene at the city’s small, grim aquarium, popular principally for its penguins. The plans had been a disappointment: a sculptural glass roof locking a bunch of exotic species in what was, effectively, a greenhouse (a deranged choice in a desert city where temperatures routinely reach 35°C). When Coppel approached Bilbao to take over the project in 2017, she and her colleagues were skeptical. “What worries me a great deal about aquariums is that way of thought, that Man Dominates Nature,” Bilbao told me. More to the point, Mazatlán stands at the mouth of the Sea of Cortés, which Jacques Cousteau famously described as “The World’s Aquarium”. “If you have one of the world’s most important natural aquariums right there in front of you,” Bilbao wanted to know, “why would you want to make a place where they’re bringing in species from who-knows-where that have nothing to do with anything?” Coppel agreed that the aquarium should be dedicated to local ecosystems. Bilbao accepted the commission.
From there, a series of questions: how could the building facilitate contact between people and ecosystems that are both so nearby and so foreign? What would such a building look like? How could a structure as densely technical as an aquarium also let the ocean in? How could they make it clear that this was a space for the city, not just tourists? How, in short, can you justify an aquarium in the 21st century?
Gran Acuario de Mazatlán’s spiral staircase (image courtesy of Tatiana Bilbao Studio).
To answer these questions, Bilbao’s office developed an elaborate backstory for the building they planned to create. It would have to be huge and heavy to contain such a complex programme; in Mexico, where that much structural steel would have been prohibitively expensive, that meant building in concrete, an increasingly embattled material. “The idea was to make a building that’s alive, that gives the impression of something that’s always been there, of a ruin that we’ve reprogrammed,” said Cortés. “The story we came up with,” Bilbao added, “was that this was a building from before and we have no clue what it was used for, there are no vestiges of its previous use.” In this scenario – both fanciful and darkly realistic – something was built, sea levels rose, the building was consumed. When water levels dropped again, say, 200 years later, ponds and pools, remnants of the retreating sea, formed among the decimated foundations. The structure reemerged, Bilbao said, “teeming with life”.
As an architectural object, the building itself is surprisingly discrete. Organised as an intersecting grid of cement walls, the tallest rising 22m above the ground, the building is only visible in its entirety from the avenue on the far side of the retention pond – a notably successful element of Bilbao’s park design where young people gather in the evening to listen to music and drink beers. From the south, the structure is largely obscured by trees. A dusty arterial road skirts its eastern side, not someplace anyone is likely to walk. And to the north lies the park, which, to date, has exactly one point of entry and, at least on the day I visited, roughly as many users. (The park, Bilbao and her team readily, if sadly, admit, has been an abject failure, in large part, it would seem, due to problems with city administrators.) Rather than open to the park, as Bilbao’s team had planned, the aquarium is fenced in, with a single ticketed entrance on its southern side. Cut off from their surroundings, the inscrutable walls seem less mysterious or majestic than they do carceral.
An architectural plan of the aquarium (image: courtesy of Tatiana Bilbao studio).
Past the fence, the building starts to take shape as a collection of transitional spaces, devoid of hierarchy. Veils of water tumble down the high walls that contain monumental staircases on either side of the building, a poetic gesture that encourages visitors to reach out and touch the cool cement surfaces. Those stairs lead to a habitable roof that Bilbao and her team conceived as an extension of the park. From there, another staircase leads down to a circular vestibule planted with a ceiba tree that will one day form a soaring canopy over the building, and a churning fountain in the tradition of Isamu Noguchi at the Camino Real in Mexico City. From here, doors open onto the aquarium’s various exhibition spaces, which descend (figuratively, rather than physically: they’re all on the same level of the building) from coastal ecosystems and mangroves through shallow littoral waters to the deep sea. Designed with no fixed pathway, the building’s layout opens itself to exploration. There’s a manta pond under a graceful oculus, sea turtles and boas, and a shark tank like an IMAX screen for kids to press their hands and faces against in wonder, like I once did with those columns in Baltimore. There are spaces, too, for research and for educational programs, all run by serious scientists. Throughout, unprogrammed interstitial spaces open to the sun and the rain, demonstrating the possibilities of passive cooling. The building is heavy, immense, frankly out of scale to the city around it, which is home to only about a half million people. But Bilbao has an explanation. “We need to think about the fact that our buildings are going to be there for a long time. Concrete and steel will last,” she told me. “If we’re going to build at all, then we should be sure that our resources can serve for a lot and for many.”
This was, I found out soon upon my arrival a month after the aquarium’s opening, a heavy conceptual load to carry, even for all those tonnes of concrete. Immediately upon opening, the aquarium’s administration found that the lack of a set path through the building was causing bottlenecks, a predictable problem in a space designed for families with young children. Up went the airport stanchions, which soon extended like vines onto the roof – closing access to most of its pleasant, landscaped corners – and around the tanks, to keep the kids from smudging or tapping on the glass. Contact between humans and nature, the animating idea behind the entire project, has its limits.
Inside of the aquarium (image: courtesy of Juan Manuel Mcgrath).
On a walk-through of the aquarium, architect Soledad Rodríguez, one the studio’s partners and the construction director in Mazatlán, pointed out the stanchions as an unfortunate administrative decision that the studio hopes will be temporary. “The building needs to tell you what it wants – people, too,” Rodríguez says, a process that, of course, takes time. But the presence of those barriers suggests a larger problem. An open plan is a nice idea, but insufficient, in itself, to overcome the practical issues of wayfinding in what is essentially a children’s museum; I struggle to think of a situation in architecture where concept should take precedence over functionality. However you want to theorise it, a building has to work, and the idea that you could build an aquarium to be anything other than an aquarium strikes me as, at best, disingenuous. Service spaces for maintaining tanks, treating water and caring for the animals occupy fully 60 per cent of the building’s immense floorspace; from a technical standpoint, an aquarium makes an opera house look like a basketball court. The image of these towering walls as heroic, post-apocalyptic memorials to our precarious present moment, with the tanks as pools left behind by the withdrawing ocean, is certainly evocative. It also has little bearing on reality.
When that larger backstory comes apart, so too do some other justifications. Take, for instance, the choice to use concrete – so much concrete – for a building whose very scale and typology were bound to raise eyebrows vis-à-vis sustainability. As Bilbao rightly (and frequently) points out, concrete is a convenient “villain of the discourse for privileged white people who have all the resources of the world at their feet.” In Mexico, she notes, which has no reliable system for certifying sustainable sourcing of timber, wood is hardly a panacea and adaptive reuse isn’t always viable because, she says, “construction isn’t necessarily as well consolidated” as it is in parts of Europe. Moreover, “if you’re imagining this building to survive above and below water, concrete serves for that.”
“Contact between humans and nature, the animating idea behind the entire project, has its limits.”
All of which is true. Except that this building cost over $100m, two-thirds paid by Coppel, the remainder by the state. And whatever possible futures we might dream up for these towering pylon-walls, in its present form, the building is neither public housing nor a free space for recreation, nor even connected in any meaningful way to the park around it. (It’s important to note, again, that this is not Bilbao’s fault. Failing to consider traffic patterns inside the museum strikes me as a design flaw; designing the building for a version of the park that works as intended is maybe more like optimism.) It’s also a clever sleight of hand to deploy an anti-colonial discourse for a building that is, in the end, a privately operated, and extremely expensive, tourist attraction, which will likely drive up real estate value in the surrounding area. (Whether that was part of the investment team’s calculus in sponsoring the project, I can’t say; I did, however, see new developments advertising their proximity to the aquarium as a perk for future buyers.) These kinds of logical contortions – comparable to those made by an actor drumming up motivations for a desperately underwritten role – shouldn’t be necessary to justify a building’s existence.
Bilbao is hardly the only architect to have twisted herself in rhetorical knots to rationalise working on a particular typology. Even Paulo Mendes da Rocha, easily among the best and most ideologically serious leftwing architects of the late 20th century, explained his many private houses for members of São Paulo’s intellectual elite by claiming that a house could one day serve some other purpose, that everything is public space, and that, as he famously used to say, “the only private space is the mind.” This is not, I don’t think, true in any meaningful way, at least not in the neoliberal world order of the post-Thatcher/Reagan era. Private homes are the palaces of the bourgeoisie, often fortified behind walls and fences or with even more effective tools of segregation like red-lining and structural racism. But a house (unless we’re talking about, say, Buckingham Palace, which is an entirely different kind of unjustifiable proposition) does not sit on public land, does not use public funds, and does not have to charge an entry fee beyond the means of most middle-class families in order to stay standing. Its program is simple and elemental: it’s just a shelter. It is not, in short, an aquarium.
“But what’s the moral calculus that allows us to decide how many changed minds are ethically equal to how many wild animals in glass cages? We have no good answers to these questions.”
Which brings us to that sticky question: How do we feel about aquariums in the 21st century? I do not have an answer to this. The best justification for aquariums, and it seems to me one worth taking seriously, is that they can serve as valuable sources of data for marine biologists. They can serve, too, as rehabilitation centres for injured animals or shelters for those so deeply and permanently harmed by human beings that they can no longer survive in the wild. More philosophically, aquariums can introduce young people to the wonders of distant, alien worlds, as the Baltimore Aquarium did for me in my childhood. The counterargument typically offered is that programs such as Planet Earth and Blue Planet make aquariums redundant, a posture that none other than David Attenborough, doyen of the nature doc, rejects. There is no replacement, he has argued, for seeing animals in person.
My early memories of Baltimore’s aquarium are deeply physical, connected as much to the sensory experience of the place as they are to the images or stories of the animals themselves. Did my childhood visits to the National Aquarium in Baltimore make me more conscientious? I hope so, though I can’t say for sure. Did they turn me into an activist for ocean health? Certainly not. In my recollection, the aquarium was, above all, a form of entertainment, and here you should note the other activities I put in its company in the opening of this essay: theatre, restaurants, the symphony. In Mazatlán, I saw children genuinely awed by the mantas and sea turtles and sharks. I saw far more people lining up for pictures in front of a (very cool) wave simulator. Are visitors learning anything? Surely some of them must be; surely at least one of these children will now harbour dreams of becoming a marine biologist, and surely the idea of an aquarium creating links to a local ecosystem – rather than one imported from far away – is exciting, a chance to reframe the apparently familiar as a source of wonder. But what’s the moral calculus that allows us to decide how many changed minds are ethically equal to how many wild animals in glass cages? We have no good answers to these questions.
The roof of the aquarium (image: courtesy of Juan Manuel Mcgrath).
While in Mazatlán, I had the chance to speak with Catherine Hart, who has been researching sea turtles in Mexico for 20 years, since the age of 18, and who was brought on as the coordinator of the sea turtle program for the Oceanic Research Center of the Mar de Cortés, the independent scientific institution working out of the aquarium. Of everyone I spoke to, she made the clearest case for the project’s existence. “I love the idea of an aquarium in the sense that we can bring the sea to people. Standing on the malecón has its impact, but only so much: there are so many distractions, it just becomes a backdrop,” she told me over coffee one morning, a few meters away from the crashing pacific. “Of course, there’s a part of you that’s going to look and think, ‘Isn’t it nicer for fish to be in the sea?’ And the answer is yes. But if we have these two or three sharks here as ambassadors, it really allows people to look at these animals as individuals, not just in terms of tonnage of by-catch.”
The idea of the aquarium, as stated by Bilbao and Hart and also the administrators, is that it should function first and foremost as a research centre. If that turns out to be true, and if the research produced at Mazatlán’s aquarium deepens our understanding for a spectacular but fragile ecosystem, then that might be justification enough. It might also turn out to be essentially a theme park for out-of-towners and their kids, a selling point to up the prices on unnecessary new condos – a classic expression of cynical, late-capitalist urbanism. Who knows?
A drone shot of the aquarium’s site in Mazatlán (image: courtesy of Tatiana Bilbao Studio).
It takes time for a building to reveal its nature, for a city to absorb it. This is one of the fundamental problems of architecture criticism: we can’t know if a building actually works until years after its completion. Maybe when the landscaping grows in, the walls will resemble a ruin rather than a fortress. Maybe the Central Park will eventually function. Maybe as visitor numbers increase, prices will go down and maybe researchers like Hart will produce invaluable new knowledge. And maybe if all that happens, the building will make sense and will become as essential to Mazatlán as the sea itself. Maybe. If so, the aquarium won’t require speculative storytelling to explain itself. In the meantime, we have a name for buildings built for fictions. They’re called follies.
Words Michael Snyder
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #2. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.