Foro Boca – “Urban Detonator”

The latest realized work of the Michel Rojkind’s studio Rojkind Arquitectos is a concert hall Foro Boca on the waterfront of the Mexican city Boca del Rio, in the state of Veracruz. In this place, the river flows into the ocean and the name of the city is literally translated from Spanish as the “river mouth”. Because of it’s geographical feature, the plot experiences the strongest northern winds in the country. When the client offered Michel Rojkind to look at possible sites for the concert hall’s construction, Mexican architect chose the most problematic and abandoned one out of them, which greatly surprised his client. Rojkind explained his decision by saying that it is because no one is interested in this place it is specially worth working with it in order to create there new opportunities for development both for the territory itself and for people living nearby.

According to Rojkind Arquitectos, the new concert hall was supposed to become kind of an “urban detonator” and to show that architecture can bring benefits for community. So far is still unclear whether the Foro Boca building will bring “Bilbao effect” (when the architect Frank Gehry managed to put a nearly unknown city, and the whole Basque region on the world map with his project of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao) in a long run, but now, in addition to the function of “house” for the Boca del Rio Philharmonic Orchestra, it serves as a space for social programs. So, in the new concert hall works a program for children from low-income families called “Orquestando Armonia”, thanks to which they can receive choral and orchestral education. But even without going deeper into particularities of new positive social transformations for the city inhabitans, one can say that, in principle, regular performances of international and local musicians in it have already radically changed cultural life of Boca del Rio for better.

One of the amazing features of the project is the possibility to watch those concerts that take place inside the building, also outside, thanks to the projection on the facade which one can look at from the public square in front of it. It seems that such a decision can potentially bring financial losses to the new concert hall, but administration of it is optimistic about this, believing that everything will be exactly the opposite. For example, local workers, who often are quite far from culture, after seeing several concerts outside the building, may one day want to save money and finally buy a ticket to the auditorium. And if not for the sake of such cultural victories, in the end, for what than is architecture?

 Text: Elizaveta Klepanova
Illustrative materials provided by Rojkind Arquitectos

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