In 2019, Carlos received a commission from filmmaker and theater producer Claudio Sodi to build a vacation rental on the Oaxacan coast, one of several such projects that he planned to develop with emergent Mexican architecture firms a short distance away from the Tadao Ando-designed artist residency Casa Wabi, run by his half-brother Bosco.
Carlos, who participated in the residency in early 2020 along with Lucas Cantu, his partner in his former project Tezontle, knew both the beauty and the challenges of the area—the exposure to the sun, the thermal inertia of concrete (a material for which local builders had developed a particular affinity while working with Ando), the way the low, scrubby forest, when brought too close, could make an otherwise breezy space feel stuffy and constrained.
To develop what would later be called Casa Monte, or Hillock House, Matos inserted a 115-square-foot plinth into the sandy soil of the lot, set on a slight rise a short distance from the shoreline. Assembled from more than 1400 concrete blocks, each one cast on site and tinted the dim red ochre of Oaxaca’s coastal soil, the portico’s thick walls suggest the seamless masonry of an Inca Temple, its hulking cylindrical columns and stepping plunge pool, which passes from the full exposure of the plinth to the shade of the semi-enclosed living area, an ancient Egyptian bath.
Though it reads as a solid terra cotta mass, Casa Monte does not, ultimately, suggest a monolithic vision of Mexican design. It speaks, instead, to Carlos’ stratigraphic understanding of his country’s art and architecture, mediating not only between indoor and outdoor or heat and shade, but also between Mexico’s many pasts, remote as much as recent, and a present still taking shape.
