Prototype · Facilities
TRIBAL DEMOUNTABLE HOTEL
Tulum, Riviera Maya, México. 2007-2008
The client asked for a hotel that could withstand hurricanes. The answer was a hotel that knows when to leave.
Resisting a hurricane in the Riviera Maya is not a construction strategy. It is a wager. The proposal started from a different question: what if the hotel learns to withdraw?
Tribal disassembles in six hours. Each unit comes apart, is transported, and reinstalled without leaving a permanent mark on the ground. The technology is from the nautical industry, lightweight composites, serialized components, industrial precision, adapted to a tropical context with environmental criteria. When conditions demand withdrawal, the whole disappears. When the storm has passed, it returns intact. The investment is not lost because the hotel is not there to take the hit.
The logic has a precedent. The Maya occupied the jungle, cultivated it, and when the vegetation reclaimed its territory they moved on and began the cycle again. They did not resist. They yielded and returned. Tribal operates with the same intelligence: permanence lies not in anchoring to the ground but in the capacity to resume operations.
In this luxury eco-lodge in the Riviera Maya, comfort does not depend on intensive air conditioning. The form of each cocoon regulates ventilation, shade, and solar exposure without active systems. As you walk along the path between jungle and beach, the cocoon begins to open to receive you. At night it can fold back to open the interior to the sky. When the restaurant starts to open from the water, it is a signal visible from the sea. Architecture responds to whoever inhabits it, not the other way around.
A question the studio returned to years later, at a different scale and with different technology, in the Acqua floating lodge. Conventional hospitality in environments like this eventually destroys exactly what its guests came to find. Tribal withdraws without leaving a mark. That is why it can return.
- Client Enchanting Group
- Location Tulum, Riviera Maya, México
- Site area 5 780 m2 / 62 215 ft2
- Design 2007–2008
- Status Proyecto
- Architect Oliverio Najmias
- Collaborators Ezequiel Najmias ⋅ Fernando Sorianello ⋅ Victoria Costa Torres ⋅ Fabián Aristizabal ⋅ Angie Glass
- Exhibitions Architecture of Necessity (Suecia, 2010) ⋅ Tour Irreverente (México,
2010) - Publications Archipendium Design (Alemania, 2013) ⋅ Irreverentes, teoría y praxis
(México, 2010)