
© Bruno Gómez de la Cueva
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When we began to work on this project, the client showed us a warehouse of 8.00 x 40.00 meters, located two blocks from one of the most important music schools in the country, the former convent of XVI Century Dominican nuns of Santa Catalina de Siena, and one of the most beloved, beautiful and visited squares in Morelia: Las Rosas.
The client wanted to turn that winery into a gastronomic market, we liked the idea, but most of all we liked the silence that was felt, (uncommon quality in the down town of a Mexican city) we also thought it was a good opportunity to combine our language with the architectures of the past and to explore the relationship and the dialectic between both.
That cellar was, in the middle of the 16th century, the backyard of the house of a wealthy family of the time. However, over time, reforms, ownership changes and different uses of the place,some modifications took place that caused the space to lose its essence. The roof was covered with aluminium sheet, the quarry walls were flattened with cement and a marble and resin floor was placed... very characteristic of the 60s. We thought that the place had lost its soul.
The design process began by identifying the most popular and crowded food places in the area. It was easy to discover that public squares were the places where people concentrated to eat; either in a nearby restaurant, on the terraces or simply on a bench in the square itself.