Location: Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

Design Team: Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos

Area: 180 m²

Year: 2025

Category: Cultural Architecture, Open-Air Gallery

Structural Engineering: Silos y Asociados

Lighting Design: Artec

Landscape Design: PAAR

Photography: Pablo Manjarrez, Ariadna Polo

Design Features: Arte Abierto Baja occupies the seaward edge of Ánima Village in Cabo San Lucas, where pedestrian retail, terracotta-toned pavilions, plazas and drought-tolerant planting shape a public face within a resort landscape. Rather than adding another object to the horizon, Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos places the 180 m² gallery four metres below grade. The building first registers through absence: an entrance, a garden and a low roofline indicate a room concealed beneath the ground.

A gently inclined, 17-metre semi-covered ramp choreographs the arrival. Leaving the bright commercial plaza, visitors descend as stone and pigmented concrete progressively narrow the field of view and the surrounding activity begins to recede. The ramp does more than negotiate level; it acts as the exhibition’s opening sequence. Only at the gallery do walls rising over five metres and an uninterrupted sky appear together, turning compression into release.

Without a conventional roof, the square enclosure reads as an excavated court. Bush-hammered pigmented concrete provides a measured backdrop for large sculpture and site-specific work while admitting sun, wind, heat and time as active parts of the visit. Shadows travel across the walls and the colour of the sky shifts overhead, moving the art beyond the controlled neutrality of a white cube. The inaugural installation by Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas uses vivid colour and an expansive silhouette to sharpen this sense of scale.

Material restraint keeps the architecture from competing with the work. Granular concrete, rough stone retaining walls and the dry garden share the tones of the site; limited openings and deep corners repeatedly crop sky, vegetation and passing figures. From ramp, threshold and centre, attention moves between architecture, artwork and climate. Curating therefore takes place not only on a wall but through the visitor’s changing elevation and pace.

In a region often shaped by enclosed resorts and private landscapes, Arte Abierto Baja offers a different kind of cultural room. It belongs to a mixed-use development, yet sets aside a free, open-air encounter with contemporary art. The project avoids both museum monumentality and scenery as spectacle. Through one measured descent, it turns passage into observation and makes a portion of sky the gallery’s most enduring shared work.

Design Team: Founded in Mexico City by Juan Sordo Madaleno in 1937, Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos is one of Mexico’s long-established architectural practices. Across three generations, its work has expanded from modernist houses and civic buildings to cultural, retail, hospitality, workplace and large mixed-use developments. The current leadership includes Javier Sordo Madaleno Bringas, Javier Sordo Madaleno de Haro and Fernando Sordo Madaleno de Haro, with teams working between Mexico City and London.

The practice describes architecture as an act of generosity, creating places in which territory, tradition and memory can remain active within contemporary life. It avoids a fixed formal signature, relying instead on iterative design to align urban relationships, operations, landscape, structure and everyday use. Decades of work on complex developments have also sharpened its ability to negotiate meaningful public space within privately delivered projects.

Arte Abierto Baja was developed across the practice’s partnership and architectural teams, with Luis Hernández and Boris Peña serving as architecture directors alongside structural, lighting, landscape and engineering consultants. The project extends the studio’s engagement with art spaces and mixed-use development while reducing architectural expression to a few precise moves: public value comes from a ramp anyone can enter and from a sunken exhibition room that remains entirely open to the sky.