Page 2 of 3
Baja California, Mexico
The places I would be if I wasn’t me
I go to these conventions (just about) every year and have been on a lot of tours, and since I’m naturally inclined to arbitrarily rate things anyway, you just know I already have a list in my head as to the best tours I have already been on. My short list of top tours start with an amazing John Lautner house tour in Los Angeles that featured stops at Silvertop and Sheats-Goldstein, and also a private house tour in Chicago that ended with a reception at an apartment on a high river facing floor in Marina City, but my very favorite was an all day tour out of Boston that went to the Exeter Library and then a museum and Frank Lloyd Wright house in Manchester, New Hampshire. But now that list in my head needs to be updated. With my schedule this year I was only able to sign up for three tours (more about that later) but somehow against all odds one of them turned out to be my new top favorite AIA tour of all time.
ET114: Identity Through Architecture: Valle de Guadalupe was a scheduled all day tour from San Diego to Baja California in Mexico. We crossed through the fourth busiest land border crossing in the world on a charter bus at San Ysidro (a little chaotic but really not too bad at all), drove along the very edge of the border right up against that wall and (apparently) the DMZ and then right along the Pacific for well over an hour before we finally got to a place that seemed even farther away than it really was.
Welcome to Cuatro Cuatros, a massive three square mile site that is being developed as a resort and designed by Mauricio Rocha and Gabriela Carrillo of Taller de Arquitectura along with a curated list of 44 of the top Mexican architectural firms. The site features vineyards, natural landscapes, a restaurant, hotel and private houses with a distinct modern style and a similar materials palette- a lot of concrete colored by the local soil, along with lot of glass and stone and steel and wood. There is still a lot to build and I imagine that five years or ten years from now there will be so much more to see but right now what is there is often jaw droppingly impressive.
We’ll start our visit to Cuatro Cuatros where our day started at Bar Buras. To get there we needed to transfer from our great big charter bus to a series of minibuses as we took steep mountain roads before arriving at the restaurant and its killer view of the coast.
After the very generous lunch, we split up into smaller groups to start to explore some of the site and buildings. Mauricio Rocha and Gabriela Carrillo of Taller de Arquitectura designed the master plan and some of the key buildings , including these striking cabins that are nestled in a hill above the vineyards. Each cabin is anchored by two solid concrete walls and a great big garage door that tilts up and shades a beautiful framed view. The Mediterranean climate in this part of Baja California is close to perfect (just like San Diego), which is why the vineyards are there and why it’s kind of nice to have your bedroom just be outside if you want it to be. I’m not quite sure how well that works at night since there are local animals out there, our guides spoke of owls and snakes who all live underground and (I’m thinking) might be looking for an upgrade in their living arrangements.
The first private house (private villa may be a better term here) that we visited was the first one built, Casa Uno by CLA CLA Studio Architecture (Claudia Turrent and Axel de la Torre). It was built dead center into the hillside (mountainside may be a better term here) and was pretty simple with a first floor of bedrooms and a top floor of shared spaces and an outdoor pool. But moving through the building was just wonderful. Everything from the fun front door to the high ceiling corridors of intentionally scarred concrete to the open top floor and its shade trellis to the often wondrous use of natural light and views reinforced just how special Cuatro Cuatros was and how lucky I was to be able to be there, even if only for one day.
Our next stop on the slideshow (which is close to being presented in chronological order but still not quite exact) are the Rio 15 Townhouses, designed by Mauricio Rocha and Gabriela Carrillo with TO / Carlos Facio and Jose Amozurrutia. These two story villas were decidedly closed and private from the outside but totally open inside with private courtyards and private pools. The exterior (and sometimes interior) first floor walls were covered with volcanic stone, while the top floor was all wood, at least on the outside.
For the slideshow I am including both of these villas together, although they are some distance apart and quite different. The first is Casa Zilin by Gabriela Carrillo and Israel Espin, it’s the house that was occupied (which explains the bad picture from the minibus) and the one that has a staircase up to a rooftop pool. This house looked amazing and I’m not the only one who thinks that- it won the 2025 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize. It would have been great to see inside and it would have been great to walk up those hand rail free stairs to the rooftop pool, but it was also nice to see it being used.
Also included here are two pictures of the Departments de Montana, a series of eleven apartments designed by Macias Peredo that are still under construction. The concrete walls and skylight cones are all there, but what is missing is all of the wood and glass and, most importantly, the roof garden. Looking at the renderings, the roof, which is fun even now in its raw and incomplete state, will eventually be covered in earth and plants and terraces as it tries its best to disappear into the mountainside.
Our time at Cuatro Cuatros is nearing its end and honestly it was not enough time for all that I want(ed to do. The tour left shortly after the morning keynote and got back over an hour late after 8pm arriving back to a closed convention center and after a separately ticked Open Studios program had already ended. Normally missing a tour or program would cause me to get upset (there’s a lot of clumsy foreshadowing in this sentence by the way), but this time, at that exact time and at that exact moment, I was fine with it. If you asked me then (or even as me now) I’d rather have spent that extra hour or two in Mexico than anywhere else in the world.
Our last Cuatro Cuatros photo is from a bathroom, but there’s a reason for that.
The last stop on our minibus tour was the winery pavilion and as soon as we arrived, I split off from the group to find a restroom. We were right about to board the bus back and while it had a restroom on it, that always feels a bit weird to use unless you really have to. So I followed the signage some distance and had the restrooms all to myself. And just like everything else I experienced at Cuatro Cuatros, it felt like an incredibly well designed and incredibly special experience. This photo shows the sinks, dramatically covered under a wood ceiling but open to a garden and fountain that stepped down towards me creating an expansive but private experience, and that fountain extended right around the submerged sinks creating reflections of the stone walls, trees and sky. I have been to a lot of restrooms and always make a point to visit them when I visit shiny new buildings and have never seen anything like this before. Just spectacular in person. And that’s a great summary of Cuatro Cuatros, a special place that I never really knew about before an AIA tour took me to see it. Great job AIA.
