Carsten Höller Installs Four Giant Silver Slides in Mexico City

Four giant spiraling silver slides now stand permanently in Mexico City. Belgian artist Carsten Höller created the installation, Mexico City Slides (2026), for Arte Abierto Polanco, embedded in Antara, an upscale open-air shopping mall combining retail, dining, entertainment, offices and public space.

Arte Abierto and Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos commissioned the work. Visitors can see it from Antara's gardens, plazas and pedestrian promenade.

The slides range from 39 to 125 feet in height and from 102 to 295 feet in length. All four are open to the public and allow four people to ride simultaneously. Riders enter from various points across the complex — the family-style restaurants, the Google offices, the Rosewood Hotel and the Arte Abierto Art Space — and all four slides converge on a single shared exit.

Höller said he wanted the installation to act as an "equalizer" and to produce a "voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind" for participants and viewers. He has long framed the slides as instruments of experience rather than sculpture alone. In 2015, he told The Guardian: "it's impossible to travel down a slide without smiling."

What does this change for Mexico City's art scene?

The commission places a major international work by Höller into everyday commercial architecture rather than a museum. Shoppers, hotel guests and office workers encounter the slides as infrastructure, not ticketed spectacle. The single shared exit turns four separate rides into one collective endpoint — a design choice consistent with the artist's stated aim of equalizing participants regardless of where they begin.

Höller began the slide franchise in 1998 and has developed it as a work in progress across the world:

• Test Site (2006), Tate Modern, London
• Victoria Slide (2011), New Museum, New York
• Vitra Slide Tower (2014), Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein
• Florence Experiment Slides (2018), Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
• DAC Slide (2020), Danish Architecture Centre, Copenhagen

The Mexico City edition extends the series into Latin America as its latest permanent iteration. With entrances spanning restaurants, corporate offices, a luxury hotel and a dedicated art space, the work will route a daily cross-section of the city's public through a single spiraling funnel — the first time the franchise reaches the region.