National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City

President López Mateos gave Pedro Ramírez Vázquez nineteen months to move the national anthropology collection out of a cramped colonial-era building and into purpose-built galleries in Chapultepec Park, and construction ran from February 1963 to the opening on 17 September 1964. Ramírez Vázquez, working with Rafael Mijares Alcérreca and Jorge Campuzano, organised the whole museum as a ring of galleries around a single courtyard, closed overhead by El Paraguas, "the umbrella": a vast concrete and aluminium canopy carried on one sculpted bronze-clad column, from which water sheets down in a ring during the rainy season. Grey Santo Tomás marble paves the courtyard; white marble, aluminium and glass line the surrounding halls, which run chronologically from the pre-Hispanic civilisations through the ethnography of Mexico's living indigenous peoples. Twelve archaeology rooms and eleven ethnography rooms open off the single continuous route, so a visitor can walk the whole of Mexican prehistory without doubling back. It remains one of the most visited museums in the Americas and, in 2025, received the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord.