Carsten Höller's Four Giant Slides Land in Mexico City

Four stainless steel slides, the tallest reaching 38 meters, will cut through Mexico City's Antara complex starting December 2026 — free of charge, one rider per tube.

Carsten Höller's Mexico City Slides (2026) is a permanent installation at Arte Abierto Polanco, commissioned by Arte Abierto and developer SOMA with architectural collaboration from Sordo Madaleno. The work belongs to Antara's latest expansion in Colonia Granada and threads through a genuinely mixed program: restaurants, Google's offices, the future Rosewood Mexico City hotel, and Arte Abierto's new cultural venue.

The numbers are worth stating plainly. The four structures run from 12 to 38 meters in height and 31 to 90 meters in length, descending from different points across the complex before converging at a shared landing area. Each slide holds one person. Four visitors can descend simultaneously and arrive side by side.

What happens when a restaurant meets an office at 20 kilometers per hour?

That convergence is the point. Höller frames the ride as an equalizing gesture: a diner, a Google employee and a hotel guest enter the same tube, surrender the same dignity to gravity, and land in the same spot. The social distinctions attached to where they came from dissolve for the length of a descent.

Even bystanders get something. Those who decline to ride still watch an unusual spectacle unfold above the complex's pedestrian spaces and gardens.

Höller has worked with slides as a medium since 1998, when he first asked what a playground object does inside an architectural setting. He calls the result 'a sculpture with people inside.' The track record runs long:

• Test Site (2006), Tate Modern, London
• Victoria Slide (2011), New Museum, New York
• Vitra Slide Tower (2014), Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein
• Isometric Slides (2015), Hayward Gallery, London
• Florence Experiment Slides (2018), Palazzo Strozzi
• DAC Slide (2020), Danish Architecture Centre
• Isometric Slides (2021), Luma Foundation, Arles
• Stockholm Slides (2025), a permanent feature of Moderna Museet's facade

Mexico City marks the series' largest architectural setting yet, binding separate parts of Antara into one shared experience rather than standing as a lone object.

The anatomy of a controlled fall

Höller insists the work isn't about speed for its own sake. Descent mixes fear, excitement and pleasure as riders briefly hand themselves over to gravity. He describes the sensation, borrowing from sociologist Roger Caillois, as 'a voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.'

The contradiction carries the idea: the slide is an engineered, controlled structure, yet the frisson comes from feeling control slip away. Physics is entirely predictable. The rider's nerves are not.

Art inside a 20-year-old retail experiment

The installation anchors a broader transformation. Antara marks its twentieth anniversary in 2026 — SOMA originally built it on a former industrial site in Colonia Granada, and it opened in 2006 as Mexico City's first open-air retail complex.

The expansion, designed by Sordo Madaleno, adds retail, dining, offices, stepped terraces, landscaped pathways and a 2,500-square-meter public garden. Arte Abierto, SOMA's nonprofit contemporary art foundation established in 2019, leads the cultural program, which also includes Now What (2026), an exhibition by Danish collective SUPERFLEX examining how human-made environments collide with natural forces.

If Stockholm's facade slides made a museum playable, Mexico City makes an entire district the toy. Whether commuters in office wear actually queue up next to hotel guests is a question December 2026 will answer.