New Building
This building is next to the National Palace and the Supreme Court building. After demolition of the old colonial-period Portal de las Flores in 1935, the current structure was built between 1941 and 1948 and designed to fit in with the rest of the architecture of the Zocalo, as well as to be symmetrical with the "old" Palace of the Ayuntamiento next door. The Portal de las Flores (Portal of the Flowers), named so either because its original owner's name was Flores, but since later it housed markets selling fresh flowers, vegetables and fruit from outlying areas, it is commonly held as the origin of the name This Portal was rebuilt in 1724 and remained the site of markets and stores until the 19th century. The 18th century building was demolished in 1935, helping to open up 20 de Noviembre Street and clearing way for the current building.
The outside of the building has relatively sober decoration with windows framed in white stone, parapets with windows and square columns. The "mini-balconies" of the windows are done in wrought iron and the corners of the third floor have estipite columns.
The interior of the vestibule is simple dominated by the main stairwell. This stairwell contains two large murals depicted the history of Mexico from the pre-Hispanic period to just past the Revolution. Both were painted by Carlos Montuy in 1986 .
When the current edifice was being built, they found the remains of the house of Doña Marina or La Malinche and that of the wife of treasurer Alonso de Estrada. Further down, they found a "tlachtli" or Aztec ball game field, a chacmool and other archeological finds.
Read more about this topic: Federal District Buildings
Famous quotes containing the word building:
“People do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it: a mouse in a pitch barrel.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)