A Troglodyte’s Winery

Baja California, Mexico

Water scarcity, logistical limitations, and a need to more efficiently manage resources all work to complicate the production of wine in the Mexico’s Valle de Guadalupe. This project serves as a response to the regional and global infrastructures of the Valle, investigating the potentials for hyper-local construction strategies to facilitating the housing of wine production. The project explores techniques and methods of excavation and retention of earth to create an architectural language that is from and of the site. Many existing wineries in the Valle de Guadalupe use passive design strategies to make their wineries comfortable and efficient. One of these strategies involves embedding winery spaces that are more thermally controlled into the landscape. In this project excavation is leveraged to facilitate thermally protected spaces critical for wine production, while also allowing for the excavated earth to be re-used as an earth form work. The main structure for the winery is a large earth concrete cast canopy, site cast on two large mounds which are formed from the earth excavated from the existing terrain. The resulting structure will resonate with the rugged character of the existing site.

The various project components are designed to engage with the existing Baja landscape. Both interior and exterior spaces, including a residential component, all leverage excavation to create habitable spaces. The spaces are also oriented to maximize views out into the landscape. These relationships are reinforced in the materialization of walls and other containing surfaces. This creation of rugged, earthen, and in situ spaces was studied in both model and plan as a way of tying together material articulation and siting strategies. The winery is envisioned as an extension of the existing rugged landscape, offering a constructed ground that acts as a canopy for the winery program. exploring contemporary potentials for earth construction processes.