Palacio de Bellas Artes

Work started on 2 August 1904 on the site of the convent of Santa Isabel, disentailed after the Reform laws and by then holding a silk mill and cheap housing for its women workers, all expropriated and demolished. Boari asked Milliken Brothers of New York for the steel, which arrived in June 1906. Then the ground gave way. Subsidence into the montmorillonite clay of the old lake began in 1907 and by 1921 the building had dropped more than 1.80 metres; it still sits well below the street. The Revolution stopped the work, Boari left for Rome in 1916, and Federico Mariscal finished the building between 1932 and 1934, so the marble exterior is Art Nouveau and the interior is Art Deco. The glass ceiling over the centre, showing Apollo and the muses, is by the Hungarian Géza Maróti. It opened on 29 September 1934.