In plan, this residence in Baja California, Mexico, could be read – at least
while squinting – as an ancient archaeological site. A grouping of parallel
but offset walls set up spatial enclosures that are ambiguous in terms of
inside/outside definitions. You could interpret it as the centre of a village
settlement, or even a sacred precinct obedient to a singular orientation...
perhaps a horizon line or distant mountaintop. Worship, anyway, seems
called for. None of the nine walls, roughly similar in length, align with each
other, which means that overlaps of space, and ‘leakage’ of areas between
the walls as described, is made important. When you add some roofs (or
rather, when the responsible architects do so), suddenly you make the site
into something transformed. But it depends, largely, on where you put
those roofs.
The building is, of course, a private villa. And it possesses one of those
physical sites that tend to cause people to ponder large thoughts.
Mexico’s Baja California is a world of arid, scrubby beauty, edged by the
remarkable sea, under constant hot sun. This house overlooks gently
cresting waves of sandy land leading away to the ocean. It has neighbours
within sight, but mostly concentrates on the big nature... and its own
awfully compelling form.
Those walls that begin the design’s diagram are made of compressed
earth, the better to seemingly rise up from the ground they sit on. They
are thick, creamy tan, smooth and traced with the pale marks of the
earthen layers that made them. They read as standalone forms, just as
they are drawn in plan. Atop them span a series of four, low, pitched roofs,
aligned perpendicular to the view, making open-bottomed ‘sheds’ of the
villa. The central bay is left roofless to act as a courtyard organising the
plan around itself. This space, visible from almost everywhere, is planted
with indigenous flora upon a sandy dirt floor. The roofs are dark-tiled,
traditional-leaning characters in the language of the scheme, laid over
Photography by Sandra Pereznieto