Mar Adentro is a kind of Medina

The first time I visited Mar Adentro’s 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.

This piece of land, located in the middle of a coastline dotted with “All Inclusive,” would have to be into a box that contained its sea –practically its 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 built and baptized as architecture. I wanted to draw my version, apart from the rest.

Moreover, I believe that the greatest virtue of architecture is the generation of sensations through space on a series of planes that are within the realm of sensitivity.

I believe this capacity becomes still greater when your surroundings allow you to meld into them. Forming thus part of your own space, I wanted to take that horizon and bring it into the foreground.

The water is an event that borders the entire project. All of the volumes open up toward the sea and turn their backs on the city, which is all that remains of the original surroundings, burdened by noise.

Mar Adentro is a kind of Medina that opens out onto the sea. Each floating volume contains interiors that form, in turn, independent universes. Each room visually contains a piece of the sea; no one can resist gazing out at it.

For a long time, I have felt that construction has failed to evolve on par with other endeavors. The automobile, for example, in a hundred years went from being a wagon to what we know today.

And yet when I look back at the Pavilion by Mies Van Der Roe. It is in essence very similar to what we see today in architecture, albeit transgressed a bit perhaps through involution.

We see unnecessarily complicated, but relatively non-complex structures scattered around the world.

Some risky proposals form part of the current panorama we refer to as modern or contemporary. But they have not been very evolutionary.

Each room was built in a factory. Poliform was our ally.

We built the entire interior structure and sent it in boxes across the sea to its destination. Where local hands assembled it on-site.

In a question of days, the first room was ready, of a quality subject to the tyranny of a machine and the wisdom of hands dedicated throughout a lifetime to construction.

There was no room for improvisation, and yet the room was fashioned with intelligence, imagination, and dedication.

I learned from those German and Italian manufacturers what we sometimes fail to intuit from schools or books over many years.

Our Mar Adentro project can be constructed entirely through this process, employing a module whose versatility allows it to be divided or added onto. Thus becoming autonomous or dependent on another structure.

Our main module is a kind of loft in half to create two rooms, as simple as that.

In summary, the module is a two-, three-, or four-bedroom apartment. We can form a house by adding on two or four more modules.

The important thing is the versatility of this structure, one that can be entirely factory-made and then raised on-site in a friendly manner.