The Eco Tower project in mexico

The Plaza de las Tres Culturas
(Place of Three Cultures) in the
Tlatelolco area of Mexico City is
soon to boast a sustainable new



office tower with a visible difference:
on one side it’s located at the base of an Aztec pyramid and the 17th century Temple of Santiago, and on the other, surrounded by numerous modern buildings housing the Foreign Affairs Ministry offices. Before reading about the Eco Tower and its firm of French/Belgian architects, this potted history of the Place of Three Cultures will help put this striking structure in its proper context. Stepping back in time.


In 1521, led by Hernán Cortés, the Spanish Conquistadors seized the Aztec region of Tlatelolco, massacring all 40,000 Aztecs in the tribe’s last stand and precipitating the subsequent fall of the ancient Aztec Empire. Mexico became known as the land of Three Cultures: a blend of influences from the Native Americans, the Spanish and the unique ‘mestizo’ European and Native American mixed race that developed over this time.
Nearly 450 years after Cortés’ victory – and just 10 days before the opening of the summer Olympic Games in Mexico City in October 1968 – the “Massacre of Tlatelolco” took place in which more than
300 unarmed students were killed by police and armed forces.

Political unrest had been simmering throughout the year as Mexican students joined by sympathisers in France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the US and elsewhere protested against the Games.
On 2nd October though, those protests turned nasty as demonstrators rioted, chanting “¡No queremos olimpiadas, queremos revolución!
(“We don’t want Olympic Games, we want revolution!”), only to be violently suppressed by their own national security forces.
Between the vestiges of a pre-Hispanic and colonial past and the Utopia of the Modern Movement (depicted in dramatic detail in the 1960’s drawings by Mexican architect Mario Pani, designer of Hotel Reforma, the first modern hotel in the country), Tlatelolco’s tortured cultural past is finally taking a turn for the better.

The Eco Tower project, formally titled the Ecological and Metropolitan Infographic Center (ECOMIC) creates a new symbol of insurrection “against the loss of freedom and the resignation of modernity”.

An ecological “freedom” Tower Designed by French/Belgian Vincent Callebaut Architectures, the 1,450 sq m ECOMIC will be an archive and permanent exhibition of the different graphic expressions of Mexico City’s territory. Chief Architect Callebaut describes the Tower with each entity, office, workshop, exposure or file spaces as having its own expression: “Each course of the visitor is visible.
The various graphic expressions of the territory of Mexico City are exposed on all the boxes of the tower”, including pre-Hispanic books on Aztec culture, plans of the colonial, revolutionary, modern and contemporary city.

Wind turbines along the building’s undulating sides with greenery along the entire structure project ECOMIC’s distinct ecological sensibilities. The Tower’s spinal column is linked all around by “an optical fibre network of glass boxes and showrooms. Thanks to this system the infographic data is shown on interior and exterior façades.”

ECOMIC is an interface between the past and future, creating a new skyline between the architectural landscape and the metropolis.
This green tower is part of the ecology movement, incorporating renewable energies such as photovoltaic (solar-powered) wind mills. “Its vocation of information is clearly expressed to the citizens, as much as its flexible space mixing the pre-Hispanic, colonial and modern entities.

It is an ambitious project talking with Mexico and her future development.” When completed, the Tower will be “a contemporary vertical landscape.