Manuel Cervantes Estudio Turns a Mexico City Transit Interchange into a Skylit Public Concourse

Few building types in Latin American cities carry more daily footfall and receive less design attention than the modal transfer center. In Mexico City these interchanges, known as CETRAMs, are where buses, minibuses, metro passengers, cyclists and street vendors meet, usually on asphalt lots defined more by traffic engineering than by architecture. At El Rosario, Manuel Cervantes Estudio, with Manuel Cervantes Céspedes as architect in charge, treated the 65,032 m² site as a piece of city rather than a parking problem. The project was completed in 2011, and some sources date it to 2012.

The brief has two parts. The first is functional: speed up transfers between transport modes. The second is civic: give the surrounding neighborhood commercial space and social and cultural facilities. What interests us is how directly the architecture links the two. Long steel-framed bars with perforated metal skins hold the street edge, and between them a skylit, stone-floored concourse lets people circulate the way they would in a market hall. The result is infrastructure that people can actually spend time in.

A Perforated Skin That Holds the Street Edge

From the road, the building reads as one long, calm line: a perforated metal screen sitting on a gray block base. The screen filters light and air without sealing the interior, which is the sensible choice for a building that has to breathe in a temperate climate and stay legible at bus speed. The perforation also softens the scale. Close up, the facade is a texture. From a distance, it is a single horizontal gesture that brings order to a chaotic edge of minibuses, fences and traffic.

The block base matters as much as the metal above it. It takes the scuffs, the leaning bodies and the daily wear of a transit edge, and it leaves the lighter material to do the representational work higher up. That division of labor is honest, and it will age well.

Canopies Built for the Bus Lane

The cantilevered steel canopies are where the building meets the vehicles, and they are its most practical feature. They push shelter out over the bus lanes, so the wait and the boarding happen under cover rather than at the curb in the rain. Slender columns keep the ground plane open for buses to maneuver and for pedestrians to cross.

Seen across the striped crosswalk, with bicycles parked at the base, the corrugated cladding and exposed frame show you how the building is made. There is no attempt to dress a transport shed as something else. The architecture comes from structure, shelter and repetition, and that restraint is a big part of why the facade works.

A Concourse Lit from Above

Inside, the decisive move is the roof. A grid of steel beams carries continuous skylights over the full length of the concourse, so the main hall runs on daylight. Polished stone floors catch and spread that light, and shopfronts line the edges. The space feels closer to a covered street or a galleria than to a terminal, which suits the brief's commercial ambitions.

The double-height hall also does something circulation diagrams rarely achieve. Escalators, bridges and the ground floor all sit in the same volume, so you can see where you are going before you get there. In a building whose main purpose is to speed up transfers, that visibility is the wayfinding system.

Mezzanines That Watch the Flow

The upper walkways, with glass balustrades, turn the concourse into something you can look down on. Commuters blur past below while others pause at the rail above. That layering of movement and stillness is what separates a civic interior from a corridor.

Looking up, the slender columns and beam grid read as a single lightweight system. The structural design, by Grupo Baysa, keeps the members thin enough that the roof seems to float over the hall instead of pressing down on it.

Stairs Treated as Public Rooms

Vertical circulation is where transit buildings usually fail: narrow, dim and anxious. Here the main stair is wide and stone-clad, set beside escalators under a sloped skylit ceiling. It is generous enough to handle a rush-hour surge without feeling like a bottleneck. A tiled brick wall and steel handrails add a material warmth that the steel-and-glass upper levels lack.

The secondary stair, squeezed between ribbed concrete block walls and dropping toward a bicycle rack, is a reminder that the project serves cyclists and pedestrians as well as bus riders. Even this back-of-house route gets a deliberate wall texture and good daylight.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows the scale of the operation: a wide grid of bus parking rows, with two elongated roofed volumes lined up along the road network. The level plans make the organizing idea clear. Two long parallel bars sit above a broad columned hall, and platform fingers reach out at one end to meet the vehicles.

The sections are where the project explains itself. Long cuts show escalators and stairs dropping into a central sunken hall, with a large glazed volume at one end. Cross sections show the raised clerestory roof that brings daylight into the middle of a deep plan, the same move you feel when you stand in the concourse.

The hand sketches are worth studying in their own right. Annotated notes on lighting, block walls and bicycle tubes show a design developed from the experience of the person on the ground: sightlines from the street to the upper floor, the feel of a stair rising through a ribbed ceiling, the depth of a cantilevered roof over a gathering crowd. Some sketches propose slatted timber roofs and louvered canopies, which suggests the built steel-and-skylight system went through a real process of refinement.

Why This Project Matters

Mexico City's CETRAMs are among the most complex projects the city has built in recent years, and they shape the daily experience of millions of people far more than any museum does. El Rosario argues that this infrastructure deserves the same spatial care as a public building. Daylight, generous stairs, legible circulation and durable materials are not luxuries here. They are what make a fast transfer possible and a slow wait bearable.

The broader lesson is about combining programs. By folding commerce and community space into the transfer function, Manuel Cervantes Estudio gives the building a reason to exist outside rush hour and gives the neighborhood a place, not just a bus stop. For cities across the region facing the same informal, traffic-dominated interchanges, El Rosario offers a workable model: steel, concrete, light and a clear plan, used with conviction.

El Rosario Modal Transfer Center (CETRAM El Rosario) by Manuel Cervantes Estudio, architect in charge Manuel Cervantes Céspedes. Location: Mexico City, Mexico. Area: 65,032 m². Year: 2011. Structural design: Grupo Baysa. Contractor: Grupo PC Constructores. Photography: Luis Gordoa.

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