INTER STATE

a winery in a thirsty valley

2019 | MIT SA+P | with: Florence Ma | critic: Cristina Parreño

section

00. THE SITE

The Valle is shifting. Water seeps - steady and slow - out from the aquifer and into the plants, the vines, the people. Yet, year by year, it doesn’t return enough to replenish what has been lost.

So, the landscape dries, tumbleweed skipping across cracked dirt, tractors trundling on dusty roads, windows overlooking vistas of scraggly bushes and patches of cultivation, the remnants of the region’s history of wine making clinging to the rocky terrain.

site plan

01. THE MATERIAL

Constructed through, and capitalizing on, the use of ubiquitous engineered highway elements, the project of collects the detritus of recent infrastructural undertakings, such as the autopista urbana sur.

The craggy ground is prepared to receive pieces, brought on the backs of trucks, their many wheels digging into the dusty earth.

plan: grape intake

02. THE PROGRAM

Inside the beams grows a new infrastructure of wine-making: walls thicken to create fermentation tanks and aging vessels made of concrete. The tops of the beams become a space for gathering and growing, public events and test vineyards, along with areas for the cultivation of native plants and olive trees.

This lush landscape that develops across the tops of the beams is fed by a water catching system: channels that run down the sides of the beam and collect water in small tanks to be redistributed to the test vineyards and native plantings.

axonometric

03. THE INTERSTITIAL

A secondary system straddles the spanning segments. Trusses stretch across the beams: another layer of infrastructure supporting hanging screens: a wire mesh that is both both delicate and resilient. The screens divide and define a shaded interstitial area somewhere between interior and exterior, between infrastructure and landscape, between the interiority of the beam and the landscape of Baja, Mexico: an inter-state.

inhabiting the beam

04. THE BEAM

And so the beam morphs to become cellar, dorm, tank, vineyard, and more. Its once utilitarian section carefully excavated and intentionally altered.

expanding the envelope

05. THE INTERSTATE

So the beams collect water and waste and grow their own oasis in the landscape of tumbleweed and cracked clay. It becomes a strange slippage in the rugged hills, both inherently a part of the ground it inhabits and strangely divergent, a highway displaced and water collected: an interstate.