
Torre Latinoamericana
Seismic-defying steel skyscraper with a sky-high restaurant and panoramic observation deck.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide follows the engineering gamble behind the Torre Latinoamericana in Mexico City: architect Augusto Álvarez and engineers Leonardo and Adolfo Zeevaert designing a forty-four-story skyscraper to float on piles sunk into the soft lakebed clay beneath the old Lake Texcoco, in the late 1940s, when everyone said it could not be done. It follows the tower up to the Miralto restaurant on the forty-first floor, with its views over the Zócalo and the Basilica of Guadalupe. Order dinner slowly, and look out over the city below.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral
Baroque cathedral raised on a drained lakebed, engineered back level after decades of sinking unevenly.
Palacio de Bellas Artes
Marble-clad theatre that sank four meters into an old lakebed during forty years of stalled construction.
Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Circular, column-free basilica roofed in oxidized copper, replacing one that sank into lakebed clay.
Diego Rivera Mural Museum
Purpose-built pavilion holding a rescued fresco cut whole from a quake-doomed hotel wall.
Floreria Mercado Jamaica
Sprawling flower market once sheltered under pioneering thin concrete umbrella canopies.
La Condesa
Oval-curved streets tracing a vanished horse racetrack, lined with art deco apartment blocks and shaded parks.