Ra! designs a boutique hotel in the historic center of San José del Cabo (México)

The city of San José del Cabo sits at the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula. Founded in 1730, it grew slowly and in scattered fashion, far from the rhythms of urban consolidation that define historic European cities. In the 1970s, the Fonatur Plan drove the tourist development of Los Cabos, establishing the hotel zone three kilometers from the historic center, with large-scale resorts and direct beach access. Between these two realities lives a city that keeps its own pace..

The historic center is small and walkable, but its urban fabric lacks the continuity of European historic cores or the density of Mexico’s colonial highland cities. The scale is horizontal, with buildings that rarely exceed two stories. The streets alternate between whitewashed colonial houses, ground-floor commercial premises, and open vacant lots, with no continuous street frontage. Color acts as the common thread: reds, ochres, yellows, and whites succeed one another freely, in an urban fabric that resembles a village more than a city.

It is in this setting that Ra! designs Hotel Laiva Plaza, a 1,557 m² building that Grupo Laiva commissioned from the Mexican studio to create hospitality woven into the pace of the historic center.

The project’s starting point is the building’s relationship with the street. Ra! sets the volume back from the building line to free a public atrium that acts as a shaded, ventilated, and passable threshold. Those walking along the pavement can enter, pause, pass through it. The experience of staying at Laiva begins at this first threshold, before any reception desk.

This entrance atrium develops the continuity between public space and interior, drawing urban flow into the building’s spatial organization. Further in, the vertical central courtyard takes over: it organizes circulation, introduces natural light, and regulates cross-ventilation, acting simultaneously as a climatic and spatial axis that governs the atmosphere of each floor. The circular openings connecting the staircases to the courtyard add a layer of visual continuity between interior and exterior.

The program is resolved across four levels: a mixed-use ground floor with restaurant, two floors of guest rooms, and a rooftop garden with pool and lounge areas oriented toward views of the surrounding urban environment. The volume steps progressively upward, generating planted terraces that, from the street, appear to grow from the building itself.

The façade defines the building: artisan stucco in coral red covers every wall, lending a unified presence that engages with the chromatic palette of the city’s historic center from a place of its own. The rhythmic repetition of the openings and interlocking planes evokes the papel picado banners that hang across the streets of San José — a local, everyday reference translated into structural and formal system. Color acts as built identity.

Inside, the same stucco wraps corridors, staircases, and rooms, generating continuity across all spaces. Travertine marble from Veracruz lines the bathrooms; handcrafted clay pieces accompany the entrance floors; wood appears wherever touch calls for it. The color shifts in tone with the light of the day — intense and warm in the morning, softer at dusk — and that variation is part of the spaces.

Ra!’s architects have turned Hotel Laiva Plaza into a fragment of city. Entering, walking through the passage, climbing the stairs alongside the courtyard, looking out from the terrace, or reaching the rooftop garden at the end of the afternoon are actions that belong to the rhythm of the historic center: gradual, measured, oriented toward the place. In this project, RA! proposes an extension of the street in the city of San José del Cabo.

Project: Laiva Plaza Hotel.
Location: San José del Cabo, BCS. México.
Client: Grupo Laiva.
Area: 1.557 m².
Completed: 2026.
Architecture: RA!.
Photography: Oscar Hernández.
Structural Engineering: DDOZ.
Hydro-sanitary Engineering: Grava | Ing. Antonio Villarreal
Electrical Engineering: Ing. Eduardo Martínez.

RA!

Some architecture studios are born from a formal search. RA! was born from the need to make people feel. Founded in 2017 in Mexico City by Cristóbal Ramírez de Aguilar, Pedro Ramírez de Aguilar, and Santiago Sierra, this architecture practice starts from a conviction that few dare to hold so clearly — that a space is only true when those who inhabit it remember it.

The name is more than an acronym. RA! is an exclamation: spirit, enthusiasm, encouragement — it condenses an attitude toward the craft, a disposition toward the creative process without fear of error or of beginning.

RA!’s proposition starts from what precedes any form — memory, the body, lived experience. Before the line, there is a deep reading of the place, of the people who will inhabit it, and of the spirit of the commission. Each project is a narrative walked through step by step, where sequence matters as much as the object, where atmosphere weighs as much as function. The emotional and technical precision intertwine.

At RA! there is no recognizable formal language from one project to the next. What exists is a methodology of openness: materials, scales, models, drawings, and systems explored in constant iteration. Error is embraced as a natural part of the creative process, and that freedom is what allows them not to repeat themselves — always building from what the place and its future inhabitants say.

More than forty projects across Mexico, Latin America, the United States, and Europe speak to their activity: housing, hospitality, public space, cultural installations, and masterplans. Competition entries in Abu Dhabi, master plans in the Andes mountain range, projects along the Mexican Caribbean coast. A studio of fifteen architects operating as an organism of multiple intelligences, guided by the conviction that architecture transforms through what it provokes.

The work has been recognized with the Gran Premio CAM-SAM, the Architectural MasterPrize, the Premio Félix Candela, the A+ Architizer Awards, the LOOP Design Awards, and the Simon Architecture Prize, awarded by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe in Barcelona. Published in Domus, Divisare, Dezeen, Designboom, ArchDaily, and Arquine, with an active presence across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and other regions of the world.

Cristóbal Ramírez de Aguilar

Cristóbal Ramírez de Aguilar studied Architecture and Urbanism at Universidad Anáhuac México, graduating in 2018. Since co-founding RA! in 2017, he has led the studio as project director with an uncommon clarity of thought: architecture does not arise from form or typology, but from human experience, context, and narrative.

At the head of a multidisciplinary team of fifteen architects, Cristóbal combines conceptual design, technical strategy, and comprehensive construction oversight. Under his direction, projects such as La Cañada, ArtWalk, and Casa LL have taken shape, each built from the same question: what does the person who inhabits this place need to feel?

Beyond practice, Cristóbal writes about the craft, the ethics of design, and the relationship between architecture and language. He is interested in what endures: an architecture that goes beyond form, seeking what it provokes in those who inhabit it.

Pedro Ramírez de Aguilar

Pedro Ramírez de Aguilar was born in Mexico City in 1987. He studied at the Universidad Iberoamericana (2011), with a specialization in Sustainable Cities. Before finding his own path, he passed through some of the most rigorous practices in the country — Tarme, Vázquez del Mercado Arquitectos, Abax Arquitectos, and FR-EE — building judgment from the margins of the craft.

In 2017 he returned to his origins: he co-founded RA! alongside his brother Cristóbal and Santiago Sierra. Since then he has led projects ranging from residential restoration to cultural space, from the Mexican Caribbean — Tulum, Cozumel — to the South American Andes. His architecture is one of slow listening. Before proposing, Pedro observes.

Beyond built practice, Pedro has explored the intersection of architecture, experimentation, and narrative, developing projects such as the short films El Trapo and El Luchador, as well as the book 30 días proyectando, an initiative that brought together 30 emerging practices in Mexico to reflect on the everyday processes of the profession.

Santiago Sierra

Santiago Sierra studied at the University of Texas at Arlington and completed his studies at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura del Vallès in Barcelona — two cities, two ways of understanding space, one single way of asking questions. His early career unfolded across studios in Mexico City: BNKR Arquitectos, República Arquitectos, Serrano Monjaraz Arquitectos. Practice was his real school.

Distance called. He moved to Paris and joined the studio of Olivier Palatre Architectes, where he led the winning proposal for the Réinventer Paris competition at the Voltaire substation. The victory made him project director. Europe refined him; Mexico reclaimed him.

In 2017 he returned to Mexico City and, alongside Cristóbal and Pedro Ramírez de Aguilar, founded RA!. He carries with him a conviction learned along the way: that distance does not separate, that what is lived abroad enriches what is built at home.

Project by RA!