The UNAM Central Campus

The central campus of the national university was built in the early 1950s on a lava field by a team of more than sixty architects, artists and engineers working to one plan, and it is one of the clearest statements anywhere of what modernism could look like when it absorbed a national tradition rather than replacing it. The Central Library is the emblem: a windowless ten-storey box covered on all four sides by a mosaic of coloured natural stone, designed by Juan O'Gorman, that runs from pre-Hispanic cosmology to the present. Diego Rivera worked in relief on the stadium. UNESCO listed the campus in 2007. The lava landscape survives as an ecological reserve within it.

What you actually see

• The Central Library - four facades of natural stone mosaic, ten storeys high.
• The Olympic stadium - Rivera's relief mural on the exterior.
• The rectory tower - Siqueiros murals projecting from the facade.
• MUAC and the sculpture space - the contemporary art museum and lava field.

When to go

Year-round; the campus is busiest and most alive on weekdays during term. Weekends are quiet and easier for photographing the library without crowds. The sculpture space on the lava field is best in late afternoon light.

Honest expectations

This is a working university of hundreds of thousands of students spread over a very large area, so it takes real walking and there is no visitor route. The library cannot be entered by non-students in most circumstances, so the mural is an exterior experience. The area outside the listed core is ordinary campus sprawl.

Nearby

Coyoacán and the Frida Kahlo museum are twenty minutes north; Xochimilco is southeast.