TEQUILA OFFICES AND WAREHOUSE.

La Nave.

Tepatitlán, Jalisco, México. 2019-2023.

We were commissioned to develop a project for an industrial facility, suitable for housing a storage space, a bottling line, offices, a laboratory and other services for a tequila enterprise. Analyzing the site, a typical Mexican volcanic landscape, we realized that we wanted to diminish the presence of the building to keep far landscape views and to maintain as much as possible the natural atmosphere we found in the original habitat. For this reason, we decided to implement an excavation -a landart operation- to bury a portion of the building and thus producing a “ceramic horizon”: the building manifests itself as a system of pitched roofs covered with brick tiles, under which the different required uses are housed. The use of regionally produced artisanal brick and stone obtained from the excavation of the site had to do with the intention of using local materials, that reveal the mineral strata. That is related to the idea of anchoring the building to its geographical volcanic context, but also with the conviction that doing so, could benefit regional producers and local labor, which in fact is a fundamental part of the tequila company´s philosophy. On the other hand, the use of brick and stone load bearing walls and buttresses, steel exposed structures, brick vaults and artisanal glass informs about our deep engagement with ritualized construction methods. With this we want to contribute to the preservation of the artisanal knowledge that is still alive in the region. Another way of relating our proposal to tradition is found in the use of the saw-tooth roof -an industrial typology- that we solved using steel girders to achieve large span spaces. In this way, a hybrid building was achieved, which is able to simultaneously relate to the site, to the local material tradition and to the technology of the present. The landing of the roof in the topography formed a set of slopes that anchors physically the building to the earth, blurring the limits between architecture and landscape.