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Fernando Romero clad the Soumaya Museum's free-form concrete shell in sixteen thousand hexagonal aluminum tiles, each one individually sized and angled to follow a surface that curves, tapers, and flares outward in ways that no two courses repeat. The tile system solved a genuine geometric problem: how to wrap a doubly curved, asymmetrical form in a flat modular unit without visible distortion, and to do it in a material that would catch Mexico City's high-altitude light differently at every hour. Here the camera has found the building's narrowest point — the pronounced waist where the lower body cinches inward before expanding again toward the crown — and the curvature bends the tile grid into something almost alive, the joints curving and compressing as the surface turns away from the lens. The frame is split almost exactly in half between the silvered tile field at left and a flat steel-blue sky at right, a division so clean it reads less like a photograph and less like an abstraction than like both at once. Romero set out to build something that looked like nothing else in the city; at close range, it looks like nothing else in the world.
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