A minimalist concrete structure encircles a space for spiritual ceremonies in the South Baja California desert, designed by Rubén Valdez Practice.
Located at the Paradero Hotel in Todos Santos, on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, the non-religious ceremony space is half buried into the arid earth to reinforce its relationship with the landscape.
Rubén Valdez Practice intentionally designed the enclosure to blend with the desert, choosing a sand-toned concrete and a low-slung form for the purposefully simple structure.
“Bare earth underfoot and an open-air roof reinforce a transcendental connection to the earth and the cosmos,” said the studio, which was founded by architect Rubén Valdez and is based between Mexico and Switzerland.
The enclosed area forms a perfect circle in plan and its board-formed concrete perimeter wall is level apart from a semicircular cutout oriented due west.
“The shape of the structure carefully frames the surrounding landscape, with a semi-circular aperture providing views out onto the mountains beyond, while the skies above are framed within the circular walls,” the studio said.
The east-west axial alignment of the structure allows those inside to track the sun’s passage through the sky and witness the changing desert light at different times of day.
A perfectly straight access route, which is offset from the east-west axis, gently ramps down to the entrance.
The view into the enclosure is initially blocked – apart from a small triangular aperture that offers a peek inside – but a corridor arcs around to an opening that leads inside.
“A single baffled entranceway offset by 45 degrees from the interior axis gradually reveals the space upon entry and creates a sense of seclusion that adds to the ceremonial nature of the site,” said Rubén Valdez Practice.
The interior of the enclosure was left largely unadorned, except for a series of simple benches that can be easily removed if needed.
There’s also a small, polished obsidian mirror directly below the semicircular that is “modelled after the traditional texcatl mirrors used for centuries in Mexican culture as objects of reflection and spiritual divination,” according to the firm.
The Paradero Hotel was also designed by Valdez along with Yashar Yektajo, and features a similar architectural language of raw concrete and monolithic forms.
The hotel opened in 2021 and is situated on a 5.5-acre (2.2-hectare) site surrounded by family-owned farms and the Sierra de la Laguna Mountains, with the beach just a 20-minute drive away.
Concrete has become an unlikely yet popular choice of material for ceremonial sites – both secular and non-secular – since the early 20th century.
Recent examples of its use include a curvaceous church in Roskilde and a pink-toned waterside mosque in Bangladesh. A host of others across Europe feature in photographer Jamie McGregor Smith’s book Sacred Modernity.
Valdez also designed the Xokol restaurant in Guadalajara, with ODAmx, which was named best interior at Dezeen Awards 2023.
The photography is by César Béjar.
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