Digital Wonderland

Location: Chapultepec Forest, Mexico

Programme: Cartographic Library Of Places That Never Were

Located, on the island of the Lago Mayor in Mexico City, the Cartographic Library houses maps of places that never existed. The library is built underground, assimilating the island’s topography, camouflaging itself while resurfacing the site. Upon retrieving a map from the underground archive, the viewers can use the laser infrastructure on the roof to recreate the imaginary/phantom place through a triangulated laser-scape of the map’s topographic character.

The building site is strangely not recorded in Google’s data maps, becoming a contemporary phantom island just like the ones it houses in its map archive. When the visitors select their maps and view them on the laser-scape, it is as if for a moment Utopia, Atlantis or City of Wonders are more real than the existent -phantom- island and the sunken library.

The underground spaces are designed following principles of landscaping, the history of French, English and Mexican gardens exploring arrangements that combine central nodes of activity and smaller more intricate connecting routes converting the library into an architectural landscape of knowledge. Conceptually, the architectural experience of the building is structured around the concept of deja-vu, created by the duplication of experiences, essentially making an architectural stereoscopy with similar experiences.