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Fernando Romero's Soumaya Museum is sheathed in roughly 16,000 hexagonal aluminum tiles, each one individually sized and positioned to follow a double-curved surface that no two cross-sections of the building share — a cladding problem solved entirely by computational geometry rather than by hand. The building's most extreme moment is its narrow waist, where the broad upper drum cinches inward before flaring back out at the base, and it is exactly this inflection point that the photograph captures. Here the two tile fields meet at an acute angle, the smaller, more elongated hexagons of the upper mass pressing down toward the wider, flatter tiles of the base, a triangle of pale blue sky opening between them like a breath held mid-sentence. The gap reads almost as a joint in a piece of jewelry — the point at which the form is most under tension, most aware of its own ambition. In a city that has never lacked for bravado, this building manages to make sixteen thousand pieces of aluminum feel like a single, unhurried gesture.
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