Antara, the commercial destination in Mexico City's Colonia Granada, draws more than 12 million visitors a year. However, after several decades of carrying the title of the first open-air retail hub in the heart of the Miguel Hidalgo neighbourhood (an area also known as Nuevo Polanco), it was time to raise the cultural bar for the community, too. The plan? To offer improved everyday living through ‘cultural placemaking’ and the infusion of art, where retail, hospitality, residential, and commercial tenants can thrive.
The next chapter for Antara
Built on a former industrial site for developer SOMA by third-generation architecture and design firm Sordo Madaleno, Antara is now conceptually evolving into a place where fine art can be found in unconventional places. The development's next chapter will hold a shopping plaza with brands from Assouline to Brunello Cucinelli and Zimmermann, along with Alo, Farm Rio and Zadig & Voltaire. New dining options range from international and stateside favourites Nobu, Milos, Mastros, and Carbone, to a Rosewood Mexico City hotel and corporate offices for Google’s Latam HQ and Sony Music. All are coming in the first quarter of 2027.
‘It's just a completely different approach to retail,’ says SOMA vice-president Javier Sordo Madaleno de Haro. ‘I think that today it's not enough to just make a nice architectural place and bring in good brands. I think the experience gets to be elevated to a different level.’
Working with SOMA and local art foundation Arte Abierto, Javier is leading the way at his family-run studio, which has been achieving groundbreaking results in the city for over 80 years. Founded by Javier’s grandfather, Juan Sordo Madaleno, who was an architect and pioneer of Mexican modernist architecture, Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos was established in 1937, influenced by Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. The firm specialises in hotels, residential, and commercial buildings.
‘One of the interesting things is that my grandfather,’ says Javier, ‘back in the day, was also very intrigued about collaborating with artists, like Mathias Goeritz and Chucho Reyes.’
Carrying on his grandfather’s legacy by leading the practice, Javier is also the founder of Arte Abierto, a non-profit foundation devoted to creating opportunities for people to enjoy contemporary art exhibitions. These are often unexpectedly found in public forums and various real estate developments in collaboration with SOMA.
‘I like the idea of giving a platform to artists, so they can create not just a large installation, but also something that's architecturally related,’ he says. ‘I've always been in love with art, but through this foundation, the collaboration with artists was extremely difficult at the beginning, because artists like the cultural part, but are usually very distant from the commercial side.’
Javier and his team developed a completely different approach to artists than, say, a museum would have about ten years ago. ‘We just give a blank canvas to the artists, a budget, and then they can just reshape it in any way they want. We started with these urban sculptures that were open to the public – not just the cultural public.'
'It should also be for kids and people who encounter it in different ways. And that was the mission behind it: I want people to go shop in a store, eat at the restaurant, find a cultural space, and interact with it. And I want the people who visit the cultural place to also have some amenities, have some fun and enjoy having lunch there. So, it's a mix of things.’
To that end, German conceptual and installation artist Carsten Höller’s Mexico City ‘Slides’ is an ambitious series of four slides of different lengths and locations. They twist and turn, and all spill out into the Antara courtyard below. Höller's work merges scientific experimentation with immersive, participatory environments – and is known for works such as Test Site at Tate Modern, The Slide at the ArcelorMittal Orbit and winter 2025’s pink carousel in St Moritz. For this project, the stainless steel slides were manufactured in Germany with transparent polycarbonate upper portions so you can look out and also see other people sliding at the same time.
‘This thing with these slides is that it takes people from very different places, metaphorically speaking, and backgrounds, from status to income, takes them all to the same place,’ says Höller.
‘There’s a sculpture with people inside, and that is a high level of diversity. On the other hand, it comes back to the essential: we are the same’
Carsten Höller
The longest slide is from the Rosewood Hotel's rooftop, by the pool. Another slide starts at the Google headquarters. The third one starts from one of the family-style restaurants, and the final one is at the art centre. ‘There's almost like a knot in the middle, where all the slides are kind of intertwined, so it's a great equaliser,’ he adds.
‘Political artwork, it's like a slide effect. It's what life is really about. It's not about what you represent, necessarily, but the fact of being alive. So, if you're a child, you just see a slide; if you're an architect, you see it maybe as a way to bring people from one place to another in a safe and energy-efficient way without escalators and stairs. But there's a sculpture with people inside, and that is a high level of diversity. On the other hand, it comes back to the essential: we are the same.’
In addition to the permanent slides, the site and Arte Abierto will offer rotating art installations on an annual basis. For the first collaboration, Copenhagen-based artists Superflex rose to the occasion to create several pieces that are in stark contrast to the linear architectural surroundings.
Comprised of three artists, Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Superflex continually explores the expanding idea of art and its social, political and ecological implications.
Pink has been an overriding colour theme in the group’s work for the past ten years – including the 2019 site-specific building installation, Dive-In, at Desert X in the Coachella Valley, California, and an underwater Super Reef off Denmark. For this work, what looks like a giant wad of bubble gum (they even handed out a cheeky container holding Goma de Mascar Sabor Tutti Frutti at the opening event for each guest to chew) is a large temporary architectural installation called Romeo.
This is somewhat of a full-circle moment for Superflex, which had one of its first Mexico City shows at Fundación Jumex next door to Museo Soumaya, which can be seen just across the street from Romeo. At night, the curved steel structure casts a purple-blue glow on the upper-level installation, which can also be viewed from the street.
‘Hyper-commercial architecture is all around this area, and everything is about straight lines and control, so we wanted to create something that looked quite different’
Jakob Fenger, Superflex
Collectively, what drew them to the project was the challenging location – in a mall on a rooftop – and that a new, unexpected audience could experience their work. According to Fenger, ‘Hyper-commercial architecture is all around this area, and everything is about straight lines and control, so we wanted to create something that looked quite different. We thought it would be interesting to work with a piece of architecture that is not formulated by humans, but formulated by other forces.’
In this case, that was gravity and clay. ‘[A piece of clay] all of a sudden dropped to the floor,’ recalls Neilsen. ‘We picked it up and thought, this is perfect. So that was the shape – there are no fingerprints. It looks from out of this world like an alien. In a way, it celebrates chance. And maybe we are not in control as much as we think. This mirrors a little bit how we think of ourselves in the world as the sort of animal on top of everything. And this architecture that we're proposing here is celebrating the opposite.’
Inside the pink cube, the artists take a ‘fly on the wall’ approach to another level with 164 hand-painted black-green, small cast flies with silver-hued wings forming two straight lines from wall to wall, and facing off each other with beady red eyes.
‘Inside Romeo, there's another logic,’ says Fenger. ‘So, the outer lodging is just kind of loss of control, and inside, there's control. It's not normal that flies line up like that. The flies are always landing on us, like an animal that likes humans. Maybe it's just a rare moment in the universe, the way they are sitting, or they are maybe plotting against us.’
The third phase of the installation is a simple sign outside the pink pavilion: ‘Now What.’ It can be a question, or can be a call for action, or maybe it's just a state of mind. Neilsen adds, ‘Because we live in a time where things are sort of moving fast, and maybe, in some state of crisis. Where are we now, and what is the moment? It’s also the sense of our relation to our surroundings, and the other creatures on the planet. Here in the work, the animals are sort of behaving in a way that is a little human-like, but the architecture is behaving in the opposite way, and what is this new way of being in the world?'
‘I want people to be surprised and to interact with it and move through the building in a different way. If you finish lunch and you want to go down the slides with your kids, you can’
Javier Sordo Madaleno
As for SOMA and Sordo Madaleno, this‘cultural placemaking’ is about the evolution of retail and mixed-use developments around the world, always through architecture. They started working with this approach about ten years ago. ‘We position cities to achieve their greatest potential, thoughtfully integrating society, nature, and the built environment.’
As for the slides connected to the corporate offices, hotel, restaurants and retail, Javier feels it all boils down to engagement. ‘It's just changing the dynamics of how people perceive the shopping or the F&B experience. I want people to be surprised and to interact with it and move through the building in a different way. If you finish lunch and you want to go down the slides with your kids, you can. It's all about creating experiences, and I think this is one of the best examples that we've done as a collaboration between an artist and an architect, just blending together the same vision. We have 500 collaborators (across all the projects) all interacting for the same purpose.’
Javier and his team also created Ánima Village in San José del Cabo, which is an open-air retail and art destination next to the new Soho House in Mexico. There is a residential component in the same development as the Park Hyatt residences and a Four Seasons (the latter was independently designed).
As for the future of SOMA's collaborations with Sordo Madaleno, after the recent Soho House opening in Mexico City, the team has nine big developments in Mexico rolling out in the next year. Among them are the tallest tower in Mexico City, a world-famous bank, and more retail spaces, including at an Aman and a Mandarin Oriental.
In other expansion news, Sordo Madaleno recently opened its first studio outside Mexico, in King's Cross, London, and will continue to develop projects in the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa. ‘I think by having the office in King's Cross, we have this new place where we can open up new frontiers, and really export what we've been working on in the past 85 years with Fernando, my brother, who’s a very talented architect, now in charge of the UK office, and also my other brother Jose, who is a very talented financier,’ says Javier. ‘We work close together, collaborating – always searching for the same vision.'
This includes the belief that: ‘The most valuable square metre in a property is […] the space that you give to the city – not the one that you lease,’ according to Javier. In short, maybe it’s a park and not more stores, but making an interaction with people and giving back. ‘Our biggest asset is those spaces. That has been our philosophy.’