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Fernando Romero clad the Soumaya Museum's organic, column-free tower in sixteen thousand hexagonal aluminum tiles, each one individually sized and positioned by computer to conform to a double-curved surface that no two tiles could cover in exactly the same way. The engineering problem was significant: how do you tile a blob? The answer was a custom computational process that treated the facade the way a cartographer treats the globe — accepting that some distortion is unavoidable, and making that distortion part of the logic. Here, shot nearly flush with the surface, the tiles fill the frame entirely, the gentle outward curve of the building compressing the upper rows and stretching the lower ones into elongated hexagons, the black joints between them shifting from grid to something closer to moiré as the eye travels down. A diagonal band of shadow cuts across the lower half of the image, the only evidence that the surface is curved rather than flat — light doing the structural drawing that the geometry alone cannot. Mexico City has always built as if the ground beneath it were stable; the Soumaya built as if the same were true of the sky.
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