Mumo, Museum Of Motorcycles
We were commissioned to design a museum to house the country’s largest collection of antique motorcycles, prior to the corporate dominance of the scene in the 1970s.
The selected site is a large plot on the outskirts of the small city of Puerto Octay, adjacent to the Cardenal Samoré border crossing into Argentina and part of the famous Pan-American Highway, linking Alaska to Tierra del Fuego--well-known, and romanticized by motorcycle enthusiasts.
The client requested a building rooted in local tradition, inheriting the legacy of the German colonization of southern Chile in the mid-19th century. It needed to be large enough to exhibit motorcycles as freely as possible, while also responding to the site’s scenic qualities, with rolling hills descending towards Lake Llanquihue under the imposing presence of Osorno Volcano.
We addressed these main variables through a wooden building consisting of a piano nobile with an open-plan exhibition space and an access floor containing the services, including a small cafeteria and a shop.
The noble floor comprises three staggered wooden pavilions made of CNC-machined laminated pino insigne--the most common fir in the country--elevated on a stepped concrete plinth against the slope, with views of Lake Llanquihue and Osorno Volcano.
For the exterior cladding, we used the same pino insigne, thermally treated to significantly enhance its weather resistance--a wooden building clad in wood, just as tradition dictates.
The three overlapping volumes segment the exhibition hall without dividing it, allowing pauses in the exhibition narrative. The spatial proposal of the fragmented yet uninterrupted noble floor emerged as a response to the type of exhibition the museum would have: hundreds of motorcycles, each with its own story and interest, yet interconnected through multiple perspectives within the same curatorial script.
The displaced naves create the necessary pauses in the narrative, easing visitor fatigue and extending their attention span.
Each pavilion consists of a pair of weaved wooden beams, turning each roof plane into a rigid diaphragm, connected to its neighbor through steel rings disguised as skylights. Light enters the building through a purely structural exercise inherent to its essential architectural resolution.
This connection between diaphragms is rigid enough to eliminate the need for additional structural linking elements that could compromise the exhibition’s aerial possibilities, such as motorcycle piles or totems.
While prefabrication using CNC-machined wooden kits represents the cutting edge of timber construction in Chile, the true technological advancement lies in replacing the highly complex gussets and metal flanges used to join the roof diaphragms with the diagonal columns of the building’s longitudinal axis with only a few Rothoblaas engineered screws. The applied technology in these small
yet significant metal elements encapsulates the distance between us as a society and the first German settlers--and the tradition they originated.
