City of Dawn and City of Walls

Connected by a coastal thread two hours south of Cancun Mexico is a town of 14,000 people called Tulum. Translated from Mayan, the name Tulum means wall or fence. The title references the ruins of a walled Mayan community built and inhabited between 1200 and 1450. The site was formerly known as Zama, meaning City of Dawn.

Sun burned, standing 40 feet above an impossible blue ocean and squinting into the southeastern sky it becomes quite clear why ancient Tulum was named the City of Dawn and why all bedroom windows should face SE.

The orientation is empowering, humbling and logically selected.

Once the site was chosen, the forest was cleared and the future city was walled on three sides with the ocean cliff providing protection on the fourth. Temples, palaces, homes and castles inhabit the site, all orthogonally positioned to the Caribbean coast and organized to worship such wonderful things as Venus and the Wind.

The ruinous landscape is intensely powerful in its topographic siting and continuing decay; an ongoing testament to the control of the sun, the planets, the wind and the waves. Landscape and architecture moving slowly into another at the hands of salt and ultraviolet leaving residual axes and green grass to revel in culturally protected moments of shade.