Collection by Aaron Britt
Mexico City: Day 1
On Thursday I headed down to Mexico City for four days of sheer design tourism. Things got underway that night with a molecular gastronomy feast the Polanco restaurant Oca. Parsley foam, man. Parsley foam. After that our small group of journalists retired to the W Hotel (which had a hammock in the bathroom!) for a good night's sleep. Click through the slideshow to see what we got up to on our first day of Mexico City design.
After our tour at the Nouvel Studio factory we headed over to furniture designer Hector Esrawe's showroom. Esrawe is one of Mexico City's leading young furniture designers, and along with others like Emiliano Godoy is leading the charge to incorporate artisanal manufacturing techniques (Mexico has loads of them) into his work.
Here's a glimpse of the central courtyard. The building is triangular and open to the sky. I love how clean the space is. Hotels that seem to want to be nightclubs really bum me out. A friend, and bureau chief at the Associated Press' Mexico City bureau, told me that the hotel has earned the nickname "Fresa DF." Apparently fresa--which means strawberry--is also Mexico City parlance for yuppie.
The final stop before dinner was at a new museum called MODO, the Museum of the Object of the Object. It's all part of collector Bruno Newman's massive cache of vintage objects. The idea behind the museum is to look critically at packaging design and the objects that make up our everyday lives. Newman has loads of boxes, tins, and wrappers from the 20th century and seeing them all at once is by turns utterly nostalgic and hilariously pedestrian.
Before an amazing dinner at Rosetta in the La Roma neighborhood--the short rib with polenta was the best dish I had on the whole trip, which is saying quite a lot--we went for a nighttime walk. I happened across a streetwear shop and could not resist taking a shot of this Tecate-inspired Nike sneaker. Stay tuned for more of my Mexican design trip.