Mexico City Stadium Interior Renovation inserts hospitality, food and beverage, suite, and club spaces within the concrete structure of Pedro Ramirez Vazquez’s 1962-1966 stadium. Across more than 15,000 square meters, the intervention uses color, timber, steel, ceramics, and custom furniture to organize a new network of interiors without obscuring the original bowl’s spatial force.
Mexico City Stadium Interior Renovation Technical Information
- ArchitectsCuaik | CDS, Luis Huerta, ESTUDIO Ignacio Urquiza Ana Paula de Alba, CAAM Arquitectos, Clásicos Mexicanos
- LocationEstadio Azteca, Mexico City, Mexico
- Gross Area15,000+ m2 | 161,459+ Sq. Ft.
- Project Year2026
- Photographs© Zaickz Moz
The stadium is understood as a living archive, where architecture carries sporting memory while accommodating new forms of collective occupation.
– Project team
Reading a Modern Stadium as Architectural Archive
Built between 1962 and 1966, Mexico City Stadium remains defined by the physical directness of its structural conception. Exposed concrete rakers, repetitive vomitory openings, and a continuous roof ring carry the seating bowl and establish a clear perimeter above the pitch. Its architecture depends less on enclosed rooms than on sectional force: ramps, terraces, seating tiers, and concourses assemble into a large civic apparatus whose scale is legible from both the city and the field.
The interior renovation occupies this existing machine rather than treating it as a neutral shell. Hospitality programs are inserted within the thickness of the stands, beneath sloping soffits and alongside the structural rhythm of the bowl. This approach preserves the stadium’s primary architectural order while giving new use to spaces that previously functioned mainly as circulation, service, or residual volume. The intervention is therefore measured against a difficult condition: it must provide controlled and intimate environments without reducing the stadium to a sequence of sealed commercial interiors.
References to Mexican modern design are deployed through abstraction rather than reconstruction. Terracotta, olive, ochre, timber slatting, ceramic surfaces, and geometric furniture establish a vocabulary associated with the country’s twentieth-century design culture, but they do not imitate a singular historical interior. The project instead works through continuities of proportion, color, and material weight, allowing contemporary components to remain distinct from the original structure’s board-marked concrete and massive geometry.
A Distributed Hospitality System Within the Stand
The renovation distributes bars, lounges, suites, dining areas, and clubs across the west and east stands, turning the stadium section into a layered hospitality system. Rather than concentrating these functions in one enclosed precinct, the project treats them as linked stations along different routes through the building. This arrangement acknowledges that stadium occupation is temporal and episodic: visitors arrive, wait, gather, watch, return to concourses, and move between the protected interior and the exposed bowl.
On the west side, The Paddock occupies three levels embedded in the seating rake. Level 2000 begins with a reception sequence and suites corridor; Level 1000 contains a bar and lounge connected to private boxes; and Level 300 places a larger social bar and suites beneath the upper structure. The vertical sequence gives each level a particular degree of enclosure and social intensity. Corridors are not merely service passages, but furnished rooms with banquettes, screens, and views into adjacent lounges, making movement part of the hospitality experience.
The Lower East Bowl offers a different relationship to the field. At competition level, the Centerline Club sits on the pitch’s central axis, with the tunnel, locker room, and corner clubs arranged in mirrored formations on either side. This plan makes the game’s geometry legible through the organization of the interior. A glazed pavilion at the foot of the players’ stair places spectators near the venue’s operational core, while the mezzanine bar aligns seating and counters directly toward the bowl. Here, the architecture uses proximity to the field, rather than elevation above it, as the principal spatial privilege.
Color, Material, and Orientation as Spatial Infrastructure
Color acts as a navigational system across The Paddock. Terracotta identifies Level 2000, yellow organizes Level 1000, and olive green defines Level 300. The strategy is more rigorous than a decorative palette because each color extends across wall panels, upholstery, joinery, bar fronts, and suite interiors. Within a stadium where repeated concrete structure can make orientation difficult, chromatic distinction gives each level a memorable identity and helps users register their position within the stacked section.
A limited material kit stabilizes the differences between the levels. Timber slat ceilings run continuously through corridors and lounges, their linear pattern reinforcing direction and drawing attention along the stand’s curve. Lacquered panel systems provide color fields with precise vertical joints, while steel-framed portals and screens establish thresholds without entirely closing off the rooms. Pale stone floors offset the density of the wall surfaces, and concealed cove lighting softens the meeting between ceiling and wall. These elements create a family resemblance between suites, bars, reception spaces, and service areas while allowing each program to retain its own scale.
The east-side terrace introduces an intentional contrast to the inward-facing west interiors. Full-height glazing and open seating place dining rooms and lounges in relation to the pitch, the city, distant volcanoes, and the stadium esplanade. On the terrace, crimson armchairs sit beneath raw concrete raker beams, making the difference between old structural mass and new fitted elements explicit. Its relationship to daylight and weather keeps the hospitality program connected to the stadium’s larger setting. It also recalls that the bowl is not simply an object in Mexico City, but a frame through which the wider landscape is continuously perceived.
Furniture, Art, and the Detail Scale of Stadium Identity
The EA Collection translates the stadium’s structural language into furniture at a smaller scale. Chairs, stools, benches, and armchairs are developed as a related set, with splayed legs and angular profiles that recall the inclination of the stadium’s rakers and ramps. Their range of heights allows the same formal logic to move between bar counters, dining tables, lounges, corridors, and terraces. Used in olive, yellow, crimson, and cobalt variations, the pieces reinforce the color system while avoiding the generic furniture typically associated with large hospitality fit-outs.
In the Tunnel Clubs, a ceramic mural turns a below-grade circulation zone into a site of memory. The tiled surface combines black-and-white athlete figures with fields of red, yellow, blue, and cyan, as well as hard-edged geometric motifs. Its serial format matches the repetitive character of the stadium’s construction, yet its imagery introduces movement, competition, and accumulated public history. Yellow seating and timber slat ceilings bring the mural into the wider interior language, while the exposed concrete soffit retains the sense of occupation beneath the stands.
The participation of five design offices is most evident in the consistency of the overall system. Shared rules govern colour assignment, timber detailing, steel thresholds, custom furniture, and the sequencing of enclosed and open spaces. Such coordination is necessary in a project spread across suites, terraces, bars, and competition-level clubs, where separate authorship could easily produce visual fragmentation. The resulting intervention relies on repetition and controlled variation: the same materials recur, but their proportions and atmospheres shift in response to the stadium’s changing sectional conditions.
About Cuaik | CDS
Founded in 2012 by Santiago Cuaik, Cuaik | CDS is a studio whose work focuses on hospitality and approaches space as a living organism in continuous dialogue with its inhabitants. The practice brings architecture, interiors, art, and furniture together as a unified system, treating design as a continuous process guided by a coherent overall vision.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Mauricio Pantoja
- Landscape designers: Rafael Lopez, Green Roof
- Other contributors: Lighting by Miguel Angel Vega and ILWT
- Other contributors: LEED consultancy by Gabriel Morales
- Other contributors: EA Collection design by ESTUDIO Ignacio Urquiza Ana Paula de Alba, Cuaik | CDS, and Luis Huerta
- Other contributors: EA Collection development and production by Piztola
- Other contributors: Ceramic mural for the Tunnel Clubs by Ceramica Suro
- Other contributors: Photography by Zaickz Moz
