Mar Adentro
Hotel
San José del Cabo, México
2018
The first time I visited the site and perceived the desert with the water in the background as a clear, diaphanous horizontal line, I felt the enormous pull of the water in the middle of a scorching sun. This piece of land, surrounded by a coastline packed with all-inclusives, had to be a box that contained its own sea and almost its own air. Circumstance and the universe had created a desert joined to the sea in a single horizontal line — the most minimalist and pure landscape a horizon can draw. On either side, that dreamlike landscape stood in contrast to what we humans conceive and build as aesthetic, and then baptize as architecture. I wanted to draw my own version, isolated from the rest.
Joe Fletcher Photography
I believe the greatest virtue of architecture is the generation of sensations — a series of planes unfold through space on a sensory level. I think that capacity is at its greatest when your surroundings allow you to merge with them and become part of your own space. In that sense, I wanted to take the horizon and bring it into the foreground. Water flows and borders the entire project; all the volumes open toward the sea and turn their backs to the city, which represents the rest of the environment — laden with noise. It is a kind of Medina open to the sea. Each floating volume contains interior bodies that are in turn independent universes; every room visually holds a piece of the sea, and no one is spared from seeing it.
I have always believed that construction has not evolved at the same pace as other fields. The automobile, for example, went in a hundred years from being a horse-drawn carriage to what we know today. When I look at Mies van der Rohe's Pavilion, it is in essence very similar to what is being built now. Architecture has perhaps transgressed slightly toward involution — today we see unnecessarily complicated yet not truly complex structures scattered across a world of daring proposals that together form a contemporary landscape we call modern or contemporary, but it has not been particularly evolutionary.
Each room was built in a factory. Poliform was our partner — we constructed the entire interior body and shipped it in boxes by sea to its destination, assembled on site by local hands. Within a few days a room was ready, its quality subject to the discipline of a machine and the wisdom of hands that have devoted a lifetime to the craft. No room for improvisation, yet made with intelligence, imagination, and determination. From the German and Italian manufacturers I learned what a whole lifetime sometimes cannot teach you to intuit in school or from books.
Our project was able to be built entirely using this process, employing a module whose versatility allows it to be divided or combined to function as either a standalone structure or one dependent on another. Our main module, for example, is a kind of loft — split in half, it becomes two of the simpler rooms; expanded, the module becomes a two, three, or four-bedroom apartment. It can also form a house when two or four bodies are joined together. What matters most is the versatility of this unit, which can be fully factory-built and just as readily assembled on site.
-Miguel Angel Aragonés
