Tierra Tinta Winery

Written by Omar Dahabra

Location: Aguascalientes, Mexico
Year: 2023
Architects: COA Arquitectura
Photography by: César Béjar

The complex is made up of three buildings and an esplanade for events that are interconnected by corridors and gardens. A restroom’s core with a warehouse and a boutique, a restaurant (unbuilt), and the winery building with a tasting room and a cellar.

The buildings are arranged with diagonal geometries, generating view sheds and enclosures between them and, on the other hand, apertures and view directionality towards the different landscape: on the one hand, the lake, vines and view sheds to a belt of eucalyptus trees, on the other, close-up vines and Cerro del Muerto on the background.

The buildings are enclosed with ‘loose’ suelocemento walls (rammed earth with cement), either freestanding, square or in “c” shape, within which the spaces are closed with light metal and sheet metal structures, the way agricultural constructions are built in the countryside.

The open space between the buildings’ walls and the esplanade is worked with low desert vegetation of cacti and bushes, olives, gravel and low stone walls that work both as benches and as retaining walls for the terraces. On the lake area, these are placed in parallel lines to create an echo to the vineyard geometry.

On the arrival, a square of walls, backdrop for a cacti row, welcomes and shows the entrance to an avenue that leads to the main esplanade. This first building contains the restroom’s core and on the façade that faces the esplanade, a pair of full-height openings show the entrances for men and women. As you enter, a cacti courtyard welcomes you to the waiting porticoes. The bathroom’s ceiling is enclosed with metal and wood screens, and a continuous steel counter for the sinks leads the experience to the common courtyard. Privacy is achieved with a low ‘T’ shaped stone wall.

The winery appears as the avenue and esplanade’s view shed with a forty-seven meter long by 5-meter-tall wall in which, once again, a full height slim opening shows the entrance. Upon entering, a courtyard receives the visitors and from it you can access on one side the production nave and on the other, the tasting room. The nave is roofed with corrugated steel sheets in ‘sawtooth’ shape taking light from the north through a steel door-window façade. The tasting room is confined with a pair of walls facing north-south, and in the other direction its facades of pivoting doors allow the continuity of the courtyard through them to exit to a wood deck cantilevered over the lake.

The interior space is covered with train sleepers’ floor and a wooden ceiling looking for warmth: and in it, only four elements: a wardrobe fixed to the wall, a pair of counter tables and a steel cylinder that through a rear opening, leads to a spiral stairway that takes you to the cellar.

Once you are downstairs, a serpent shaped pathway allows you to leave behind the natural light and dramatize the surprise upon the arrival. While being under the production nave, twin columns support the concrete slab and the steel beams freeing the lateral existing earth walls that are product of the excavation. A cabinet full of bottles, boulders moistened by water drops, a countertop and wine barrels on the floor complete the space searching for the ideal atmosphere for both the wine maturation and the wine enjoyment. Text description by the architects.

Source: www.divisare.com + www.coaarquitectura.com

Omar Dahabra
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