Baja California. An ongoing residential project in the CuatroCuatros vineyards

Mexican architects Mauricio Rocha and Gabriela Carrillo from Taller de Arquitectura, together with Claudia Turrent and Gracia Estudio, are directing an ongoing residential project in the CuatroCuatros vineyards in Baja California. The concept is to combine the vineyard service buildings with a diffused hotel and residential cabins, distributed in a large area next to the sea. Rocha + Carrillo designed the main vineyard building, the viewpoint, the bathrooms, the beach bar and the hotel’s cabins. The residential units are to grow in number with the collaboration of Mexican and international architects. Solano Benitez, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Carla Juaçaba, Legorreta + Legorreta, Javier Sánchez, Tatiana Bilbao, Rozana Montiel, Macías Peredo, Ambrosi Etchegaray, MMX, Productora and S-AR, are some of the 20/40 selected names.

“Customers who buy a lot will have to choose an architect within this list, the architects will respect the established tariff and will work according to a group of rules established by the committee,” Rocha + Carrillo explain. “They will seek to develop projects in accordance with the landscape, in their character of silence but at the same time provocative and spatially surprising.”

“We started working on this project at the invitation for Gerardo Turrent more than ten years ago with the intention of making an intelligent development, focused on maintaining the beauty of the landscape through contemporary architecture. A model of inhabiting a territory with a wide program of amenities including three hotels, a clubhouse, a sports club, spa among others, plus 500 houses that we thought we should not design all but make a curatorship of architects related to the premises of development.”

The participation of an attractive list of architects allows to accompany the process with events, exhibitions, publications and cultural and academic initiatives. The project has been coordinated through round tables with the participation of the architects, and the presence of curators, press and more than two hundred students from Mexican and American Universities. The core design principles deal with the preservation of the landscape, the materiality of the new built forms and the contemporary social context. During these meetings the architects had the opportunity to get to know the area, to inform a design in harmony with the preexistence, looking for a development in balance with nature and local resources.