The building was designed by
Bruno Möhring as a pavilion for a 1902 art and textile exhibition in
Düsseldorf,
Germany. It was manufactured in
Oberhausen by
Gutehoffnungshütte. After the exhibition fair was over, three of the building's four halls shipped to Mexico, and reassembled between 1903 and 1905 at the Colonia Santa María la Ribera site, under the auspices of the engineers Hugo Dorner Bacmeister and Aurelio Luis Ruelas. In 1905, Landero y Coss' company went bankrupt and in 1909, a lease was signed with the then Department of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, to allocate the building to the National Museum of Natural History. In the following year, the building was used to house the Japanese Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition of Mexico, which was held as part of Mexico's celebrations of the centenary of Independence. It was at this time when the building was known as the
Crystal Palace, due to its steel beams, columns, and windows, which resembled the 1851
structure in London, There is no record of any other activity carried on the premises until the December 1, 1913, when it opened as the National Museum of Natural History, whose founding collection came from the collection of Culture Museum, located in the City Centre, with sections in Botany, Zoology, Biology, Mineralogy and Geology. In 1926, the widow of
Andrew Carnegie donated a
Jurassic dinosaur,
Diplodocus, to the museum, which defined the identity of the museum for decades. In 1964, the museum was closed and the collections were transferred to other museums and university departments. After being abandoned for close to ten years, in 1973 UNAM began to rehabilitate the space; on 25 November 1975, the Chopo Museum was inaugurated. From 2004 to 2010, an update, expansion and renovation of the museum was done by UNAM and the architecture firm TEN Arquitectos. a ==Architecture and fittings==