12.6.2019 | DIGS.NET 33
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f Hotel Mar Adentro looks like a set piece from a sci-
fi epic, this is not because of its reasonable proximity
to Hollywood. e modern architectural masterpiece
is a product of its home country, located in the Colonial
Mexico resort beach town of Los Cabos and conjured in
the extravagantly gifted mind of Mexico-born and -based
architect, Miguel Angel Aragonés.
Both Mar Adentro and Aragonés are revelations in
their respective realms, and the same can be said of a site
that captured the imagination of the architect. "e first
time I visited this property and took in the desert and the
diaphanous, clear water running along a horizontal line in
the background, I felt the enormous drive of water under
a scorching sun," Aragonés has noted. "is piece of land,
located in the middle of a coastline dotted with 'All Inclusives,'
would have to be transformed into a box that contained its own
sea—practically its own air—given the happy circumstance
that the universe had created a desert joined to the sea along a
horizontal line. It was the purest, most minimalist landscape
a horizon could have drawn. On either side, this dreamlike
scenery collided with what humans consider to be aesthetic,
and build and baptize as architecture. I wanted to draw my
own version, apart from the rest."
It took an ambitious program to realize this vision. And a
vision it is too. Mar Adentro is as remarkable as its setting is
spectacular, one that is of a paradoxical nature, with desert,
sea and sky offering a raw, primitive beauty. Combined with
the physical composition of the architecture, marked by stark,
unambiguous white, the hotel asserts itself as a canvas for the
depth of Aragonés's inclinations and a strong aspirant for the
rarefied pantheon of architecture that is highly attuned to
feeling. "I believe that the greatest virtue of architecture is the
generation of sensations through space on a series of planes
that are found within the realm of sensitivity," Aragonés
offers. "I believe this capacity becomes still greater when your
surroundings allow you to meld into them, forming thus part
of your own space; in this sense, I wanted to take that horizon
and bring it into the foreground."
