Dominus in Depth

by Kevin Matthews

Almost ten years ago, the Dominus Estate Winery was one of Herzog and de Meuron's first works in the U.S. to catch critical attention. To understand the design approach of this Pritzker and Stirling Prize-winning firm, and more importantly in terms of the architecture

itself, it is worth taking a closer look.

Obviously a powerful, dramatic piece of pure Modernist minimalism, on close inspection the Dominus Winery turns out to also be a richly integrated building. To start, synthesis is worn on its face, where the pure, hard, abstract silhouette is grounded by its rendering in rough local stone, stacked via the surprising informality of the gabions (rectangular baskets of heavy wire mesh, filled with rock, which are typically used in retaining earthworks).

The long, low rectangle of the main facade is severe. But within the overall plain rectangular wall expression of the gabions there is a charming measure of finer detail. Variation in the wire mesh density and in the size of fill rock are finely orchestrated to a classical gravitational theme, with the strength of high-density mesh and close-packed rock establishing robustness at the base, then a middle then of more open mesh with close-packed rock for the main wall, capped by a top band with the more open spacing of larger rock.   >>>

The long low form, perpendicular to the approach, is relieved by two large rectangular archways. The main entry archway is directly on axis with the gravel road one arrives by, which first passes perfectly below the over-arching limbs of a majestic ancient oak, and which continues beyond the building out through the vineyard to a distant cleft in the rolling backdrop hills. The modern object, which would be alien in its abstraction except for its thick local stone wrapping, turns out to be keyed in placed by the history of the site in millions and hundreds of years. Inside the main archway, a suitably-large painting hangs over a simple bench on the tank room side. On the right or western side, a pair of openings

SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE

Overview of Dominus Winery by Herzog and DeMeuron. Kevin Matthews/Artifice Images

The main entry space of the winery, seen here

balance the strong simple interior elevation, one to the stair and elevator up to the offices and event areas, the other through thick bottle-green glass doors to the tasting room and the sunken barrel room beyond it. The stair upwards is turned back, so that arriving on the upper floor terrace, both indoor and outdoor, one is faced northward at the sweeping sunlit view across the front vineyard and across the valley, with the reception and administrative offices cased purely in glass, inset to the left several feet inward from the building wall. Overhead the ceiling is clad in fine gray metal mesh, with perfectly minimal detailing at every boundary. The sweeping view is framed by large metal mesh, as if trellising above, with solid-feeling steel tubing cantilevers from above as a supporting structure, planar-to and on-module with the gabion surface below and beside. The long view slot parallels and dramatizes the long circulation edges of the upper floor terrace. At the far west of the upper floor, beyond the administrative suite, a large open area serves as a flexible event space, flanked to the south by another sheer-glass enclosure for the conference room, and wrapped at the perimeter by the continued horizontal syncopation of steel cross-braced gabions and mesh-trellised view slots. Completing the perimeter circuit around through 180

from the south (or back) side, is set in a bold rectangular archway. Kevin Matthews/Artifice Images

The metal mesh gabion baskets and their wire connections are an important part of the minimalist ornamental language of the winery. Kevin Matthews/Artifice Images

The simple components of metal mesh, two sizes of rock, and steel tube framing on a matching module combine in an elevated composition. Kevin Matthews/Artifice Images

Inside the main entry

degrees, back to the balcony edge enfronting the two-story space at the main entry archway, one encounters another magic. The dark corridor of a walkway bridging the flat archway opening is magically illuminated with shards of brilliant light, a crystal cave turned of the simple gabions, concrete, and steel. The second archway through the building mass is a much more private working space, without axial drama and flanked in the south facade by a single window each informally - through perfectly - placed to the side and above. At the far east end of the building, ground-level-to-parapet gabion walls of the larger fill rock serve to wrap an outdoor working courtyard, allowing any messy activity that might otherwise distract the purity of building-in-landscape to instead be chastely contained. Symmetries are loose yet finely-balanced throughout the facade and spatial compositions. All the breadth of winery functions, from greeting, management, and sales to receiving, processing, fermenting, bottling, and aging, are unified into the one pure building block. The gabion skin and rectilinear massing impress the solidity of a brick, yet are permeated richly and repeatedly with transparent modulations. It is a foreign object of pure geometry, yet beautifully-sited and roughly, warmly local in color, texture, and chemistry. The gabion facade walls that provide for such aesthetic subtly in

archway, the composed interior elevation continues the deliberate-while-simple language of the design. Kevin Matthews/Artifice Images

A severe stairway leads up from the cool, enclosed areas below to the transparent administrative areas above. Kevin Matthews/Artifice Images

Upstairs, an internal balcony connects the office lobby area with the main entry archway. Kevin Matthews/Artifice Images

Glazed boxes set in from

composition serve also to effectively moderate the valley climate for human and enological occupants alike. Permitted under later-day planning rules that prohibit retail customers (to prevent death-by-traffic of Napa Valley's agricultural essence) the Dominus Estate Winery is not open to visitation. It is an art collectors' art object, which we can be pleased to appreciate from a distance, and in photographs, grasping simply how elegantly its concept is embodied. It is an object lesson in less becoming much, much more.   >>> Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum...  

the facade wall provide both functional separation and visual connection for the offices. Kevin Matthews/Artifice Images

 

A combination of sensorial and intellectual pleasure": that's how Jorge Silvetti, member of the panel of judges which awarded the Pritzker Prize for 2001, described the architecture of Herzog & De Meuron, winners of the competition for London's New Modern Tate Gallery.California's Dominus Winery (1995-1998) is one of the most interesting examples of the cursus of their work.The building is a wine cellar for storage of barrels and barriques which also incorporates the winery's offices.The project demonstrates a dual intuition. On the one hand, instead of reducing the visual impact resulting from the building's size (100 m long, 25 m wide and 9 m high), the two Swiss architects chose to emphasize its disproportionate measures, giving the exterior the three-dimensional qualities of a single compact volume. On the other hand, they came up with an aesthetically new but functionally correct way of using materials.

The building's "skin" is made of modular gabions of wire mesh "containing" masses of locally quarried stone of different shapes and sizes - a technology commonly used in river engineering - made rigid by a metal structure, also modular, on the interior. This solution creates an entirely new and surprising effect. On the outside, the varying hues of the basalt, from black to green, considerably attenuate the impact on the environment that an architectural object of this type could potentially have: the building blends into the surrounding landscape, and seems to become a simple horizontal line, only slightly more structured and precise than the lines formed by the rows of grapevines. On the inside, the quantity of stone contained in individual gabions varies to permit differentiation of the thickness of the masonry: this moderates extremes of temperature, as in old buildings, while providing ventilation and natural lighting, even though the larger stones are placed on top and the smaller stones on the bottom, in a solution which overturns the ancient tradition of ashlar-work.H&DeM comment: "You could describe our use of gabions as a sort of stone wickerwork with varying degrees of transparency, more like skin than traditional masonry". In actual fact, the linguistic choice of an exterior seen as a wrapping or "informative skin", characteristic of contemporary architecture, appears frequently in the work of the two Swiss architects, who use it to create a sort of "special effect" which is highly original and yet economical. Thus the SUVA Building facade is based on a module composed of panels of three different types of glass - depending on the functions housed inside - while in Signal Tower 4 the building is tightly wound in a sort of

copper strip which makes it look like a Faraday cage.In the Ricola Marketing Building, the wrapper consists of translucent polycarbonate panels bearing the company's logo: in any case, the final effect is always one of transparency, which permits us to read the interior of the building, as though through a sort of filigree, as in some of Kazhuo Sejima's architecture.In the Dominus Winery this effect is achieved inside the building.For light filters through the masses, forming an ever-changing weave which depends on atmospheric conditions and the shapes of the stones: the effect is something entirely new, rather like a fascinating brise-soleil, repeated in the glass in the office area. On the other hand, the "cuts" through which vehicles gain access into the massive bulk of the construction permit it to connect up with the restful hilly landscape behind it. With these huge "windows" the Winery project is somehow similar to the New Tate, though strangely it also reminds us of similar operations in historic architecture, such as Vasari's example for the Ponte Vecchio in Florence or the loggias in Castiglion Fiorentino.

But the language used remains rationalist: the boldly elongated, monolithic volume, the clear, rigorous profile of the openings and the functional clarity of the plan, resolved in a single elegant rectangle, are clearly reminiscent of similar experiences, for instance, in the architecture of Mies, while the mechanism of repetition of components (in this case the gabions with their masses) does not impede the formal experimentation which leads H&DeM to describe their architecture as follows: "The force of our buildings lies in their immediate, visceral impact on the visitor". In the context of that continuous crossing-over between memory and invention that is the outstanding characteristic of their style.

To the religious and the secular alike, wine holds a special place in the hearts of men.  It is no surprise, then, that the wineries of the world have become like churches themselves– while adherents to the worship of wine travel the world over, visiting the great wineries in Napa, in France, in Argentina.  Continuing this metaphor, the modern wineries of today have been given the same architectural importance as the chapels of times past.  To celebrate the most

progressive, most beautiful modern wineries in the world today, here is DesignCrave’s list of the Ten Architectural Wonders of the Wine World.

Dominus Winery, California (shown above)When Dominus Winery decided to build their new winery in Napa Valley, California, they turned to Herzog & De Meuron architects to design a functional, environmentally conscious warehouse, winery and office building.  The result is a stunning angular obelisk of natural stones contained within a tough wire mesh.  From afar, the building appears to be fully concrete, but as you approach its stone character is revealed.  The result is a functional system that allows the California breezes to aerate the winery and its product.  [photos courtesy: ianxharris and brandonshigeta]

Peregrine Winery, New Zealand

Designer Chris Kelly’s simple industrial canopy lets the light in while offering spectacular views of the countryside. Kelly has described it as “a transformation reflecting the process the grapes go through.” Judges from UK magazine The Architectural Review like it too, placing it in the top five of its annual emerging architecture awards. [Peregrine Wines]

The Merus Winery

A wide open tasting room with couches and a communal table make this Napa Valley, Calif., winery a great place share drinks with friends. The smooth black countertops and slightly arched ceilings give way to the somewhat un-modern arched ceilings, but we’re okay with that. [Merus Winery]

López De Heredia Winery

Though much of this winery’s architecture dates back to the 19th century, designer Zaha Hadid built a thoroughly modern stand at the front of the complex to greet visitors. The structure, built of a lattice framework of metallic rails, blends with the surrounding walkways

and accesses. It’s a modular building, but we like it right where it is. [Lopez de Heredia, Photo]

O. Fournier Winery

First, get the pronunciation right: O-Four-Knee-Err, because it’s Spanish, not French, being located in Argentina. Now, admire how the green fields give way to the building, which winds up to a perfect frame of the Andes Mountains. To minimize the use of pumps, this winery uses gravity, and somehow this architecture manages to suggest that. [O. Fournier]

Petra Winery

Designer Mario Botta has said this structure “wants to be a new version of the old houses in the countryside in Tuscany,” in which the surrounding farmland plays a role in the overall design. Made of stone, the building features plant life on top and two arcades that extend, flowerlike, out to the grounds. [Petra, Image]

I. Boutaris & Son Winery

Fitting with the quaint white structures that dot Santorini’s cliffsides, this winery in Megalohori includes an administration area, an exhibition and sales building and “Tholos,” the domed structure pictured above. Tastings and audio-visual presentations happen inside, but the real treat is outside, with the contrast of the buildings against the greens and blues of the island. [Designer Yannos Yanniotis, Photo]

Artesa Vineyards & Winery

This Napa Valley winery has the unusual appearance of being built right into the countryside. Hints of the manmade come from the entrance way and the prism-shaped window, which offers great views from the inside. The building, also peppered with artwork, follows a path to a courtyard with a beautiful fountain. [Artesa, Photo]

Winery Collemassari

This Italian winery resembles a luxurious modern home, but maintains the spirit of a factory, with each compartment performing its individual task in making wine. The browns of the building blend with the green grounds, as do the horizontal and vertical lines leading to the vineyards. [Photo]

Leo Hillinger Winery

Inside and out, the Leo Hillinger in Austria oozes style. The building keeps a low profile with to the grounds, cut deeply into the slope and replaced with soil used to plant grapes. The eight pyramidal structures you see in the left-hand photo let light into the underground production halls, and at night the well-lit grand window can be seen from miles away. [Leo Hillinger]

Thanks for reading, DesignCravers, Diggers, Stumblers and otherwise.  Which of these is your favorite example of winery architecture?  Have you visited Napa, the wineries of France or otherwise and have seen any that we should include here?  Let us know in the comments.  Thanks again for reading!

winery architecture

mission hill family estate, westbank, british columbia by olson sundberg kundig allen

architects typically make headlines with their experimental opera houses, art galleries and skyscrapers, winery design is one building typology that doesn’t get mentioned often. however, deputy dog recently assembled a collection of architectural wineries designed by a renouned list of architects, which includes santiago calatrava, herzog & de meuron and zaha hadid.

mission hill family estate, westbank, british columbia by olson sundberg kundig allen

peregrine winery, queenstown, new zealand by chris kelly

peregrine winery, queenstown, new zealand by chris kelly

dominus winery, napa valley, USA by herzog & de meuron

dominus winery, napa valley, USA by herzog & de meuron

bodegas ysios, rioja, spain by santiago calatrava

bodegas ysios, rioja, spain by santiago calatrava

The incredible new architecture of wine: a publishing phenomenon.

Text © Hugh Pearman. First published in The World of Fine Wine magazine, issue #9. Photo of Santiago Calatrava’s

Bodegas Ysios by Erhard Pfeiffer from Adventurous Wine Architecture, by Michael Webb.

When I wrote about the new breed of wineries for the launch issue of The World of Fine Wine in

2004, this was still a relatively undocumented phenomenon. I was happily learning as I went

along, discovering places and wines I didn’t know existed, from South Africa to Chile, California

to Spain. Clearly a lot of other people were thinking along the same lines, and it seems they were all

writing books on the subject. The result? Suddenly there is an outpouring of impressive volumes all

about the new architecture of wine. I have five beside me as I write. Five! Seldom has a single building

type received so much attention all at once.

Why should this be? Why should five separate publishers in three countries want to produce books called

variously: Adventurous Wine Architecture; Wineries with Style; Wine by Design; Wineries - architecture and

design; and Caves - architectures du vin? In the past, books on wine architecture (including travelogues) have

tended to confine themselves to historic areas, especially the glories to be found in Bordeaux. A fine recent

example of this genre is “Bordeaux Chateaux”, one of those lavishly-photographed coffee-table books recording

the buildings of the 61 Grands Crus Classes created by Napoleon III in 1855: therefore an 150th anniversary

publication exalting the hegemony of fine claret, and the buildings and processes associated with it. This is all

very well and good, but no reader of this magazine needs telling that there is more to good and great wine than

Bordeaux. These days, the Bordelais do not have the monopoly on good architecture, either.

Wine publishing is a broad church, and it is getting broader all the time. Ask Amazon to hunt out books which

involve wine in one way or another, and you get a daunting 23,701 references. The less prolix British Library

catalogue throws up 3,565. Even if you discount all the cookbooks (why should you?) and red-herring novels

such as “Last of the Summer Wine”, that is still a lot of books. A truer test, perhaps, is the word “wineries” –

somewhat specialised, you might think – which elicits a healthy 165 responses from Amazon. That’s nothing

compared to the bibliography at the back of the French book in our crop, which ferrets out hundreds of

references under ten subject headings (including the one of “literature, poetry and arts”). You would need a

reader’s ticket to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris to be able to test the authors on all those. Tellingly, none of

the relatively few examples specifically to do with the renaissance of wine architecture are of earlier date than

1988.

Before the rush of new arrivals, the categories were pretty much as you’d expect. We have the familiar guides to

regions and vintages and wine types. We also have the equivalents of bibles and prayer books (Johnson’s World

Atlas of Wine and his annual pocket wine book, say, and of course Robert Parker with his scoring system, and so

on down to the many lesser copycat buyers’ guides). There are technical manuals telling you how to set up and

operate a winery. There are arcane books on the chemistry of wine and its economics. There are the parochial

accounts of regional wine trails and tasting rooms that tend to occupy a dusty corner of the oenophile’s library

next to the hanging anorak. If you find yourself in Oregon, or the Shawangunk mountains of upstate New York,

you will find a guide to the vineyards and wineries there, and this is surely true of every wine-producing region in

the world. Wine tourism is big business, and where there is tourism there will be publications catering for the

tourist. But this latest wave of wine architecture books is something different again. It is a whole new publishing

niche.

This is crossover stuff: in some cases the writing is hardly about wine at all, or even the process of wine-making.

They are mostly (with one interesting exception, wine writer Peter Richards’ Wineries with Style,) written from the

point of view of the architecture buff. And nothing gets an architecture buff more excited than the emergence of

what looks like a new kind of building. To many, of course, the very idea of this will be preposterous. What could

be more ancient than a winery? Have they not been in existence for as long as civilisation itself? Indeed so, and

in the traditional European vineyards they have also seen the application or adoption of some fancy architecture,

particularly in Bordeaux – where the residence, the farm and the factory all came together in one complex

honoured with the name chateau, even if the building in question was not in truth very grand. Pedants will note

that “chateau” can be a virtual rather than an actual concept, as at Chateau Duhart-Millon Rothschild in Pauillac,

where there is no physical chateau at all. In this context, “chateau” is just a way of identifying a particular wine

estate. In other contexts, it is not even that, rather a mere branding device: plenty of cheap generic claret, not to

mention wine from elsewhere, comes with a phantom chateau on the label. But what is all this telling us? Only

that in a region where terroir is all-important, it is seen as essential for the wine to be clearly identified with a

particular place. Elsewhere in France, let alone the rest of Europe and the rest of the world, different systems of

wine-making and identification apply. Where wines are blended from a wide area, for instance, there would seem

to be no point in making a big deal out of any particular building.

Well, that used to be the case, but not any more. Wine tourism and branding go hand in hand. Just as the fashion

chain Prada transformed its image through its adoption of world-famous “signature” architects for its stores such

as Rem Koolhaas and Herzog and de Meuron, so wine brands wanting to differentiate themselves from the

common herd started to do exactly the same. There is clearly nothing new in this idea: West London’s Art Deco

Hoover factory, placed for maximum visibility to passing motorists exalted vacuum cleaners in just the same way

in the 1930s. The architecture lent a well-regarded product a touch of class.

Combine this simple marketing proposition with the global spread of ambitious wine-making, the revival of some

neglected regions, and the rediscovery of the part-pragmatic, part-mystical properties of terroir, and you have

fertile ground for the new architectures of wine to sprout.

The new wine-architecture books obviously differ from each other, cover different projects in different ways, have

preconceptions dependent to some extent on the home countries of their authors or publishers, but there are

certain key recent buildings that tend to crop up in more than one, and often in several. So if you cast your net

across all five books, and extract the top ten buildings that keep appearing, you could conclude that the following

examples are, architecturally speaking the best, or most original, or at any rate the most eye-catching in the

world in recent times. In date order of completion, these are:

Clos Pegase, Napa Valley, USA, by Michael Graves, 1987: the post-modern citadel of wine that frightened the horses in Bordeaux and began the whole process of ambitious new wine architecture we see today. Bodegas Marco Real, Navarra, Spain, by Francisco Jose Mangado Beloqui – 1991. Crisp, low-lying, stone-clad - a foretaste of the astonishing changes about to hit Northern Spain.

Vergelegen, Stellenbosch, South Africa, by Dillon and de Gastines, 1992, architects who had started Bordeaux’s fight-back by extending Chateau Pichon-Longeueville Baron shortly before, here gave an ancient estate a new twist.

Domaine Disznoko, Tokaj, Hungary, by Dezso Ekler, 1995. Hungary’s unique nationalist “organic” architecture found an appropriate outlet.

Dominus winery, Napa Valley, California, by architects Herzog and de Meuron - 1998. Minimalist, rectilinear, clad in rubble-filled wire cages known as “gabions” to regulate the heat.

Bodegas Julian Chivite, Navarra, Spain, by Rafael Moneo, 2001. Relatively modest additions to new vineyards in an old farming village, but architecturally aristocratic.

Bodegas Ysios, Rioja, Spain, by Santiago Calatrava, 2001. Bravura curves both vertically and horizontally. A marketing masterstroke.

Caves Les Aurelles, Nizas, France, by Gilles Perraudin, 2001. Simple, almost primitive, blocks of pale solid stone keep the interior cathedral-cool.

Perez Cruz winery, Maipo, Chile, by José Cruz Ovalle, 2002. A virtuoso exercise in sensually curved all-timber construction.

Cantina Petra, Livorno, Italy, by Mario Botta, 2003. At typical piece of mystical symmetry from Botta, its central chamfered-ovoid hall is reminiscent of many of his houses, churches and museums.

Most of the authors also mention the trademark billowing metalwork of Frank Gehry’s as-yet unfinished Le Clos

Jordanne in Ontario, Canada, and his nearly-complete Marques de Riscal visitor centre and hotel in northern

Spain. Some even mention the two wineries coming up by British architects: Richard Rogers’ Bodegas Protos, a

triangular barrel-vaulted composition in Spain’s Ribero del Duero – due to open in 2006 - and Norman Foster’s

rival Faustino winery, also in Ribero del Duero, shaped a bit like a giant three-bladed ship’s propeller and

scheduled for 2007.

In truth there are several others that would easily

expand the Top Ten above to 20 or more. The two

differently Mayan-inspired wineries of Chile’s Bodegas

Septima (a favourite of mine, by architects Eliana

Bormida and Mario Yanzon) and Argentina’s Catena

Zapata (Pablo Sanchez Elia) are hot contenders for

instance, as is American architect Stephen Holl’s

Loisium wine visitor centre of 2003 in Langenlois,

Austria – a deconstructed metal box. Australia’s rusted-industrial-chic Shadowfax in Victoria by Roger Wood and

Randal Marsh, and New Zealand’s post-modern vernacular Craggy Range at Hawke’s Bay, by architect John

Blair, have their adherents.

The list is ever-expanding. But there is no question what is the single most-published modern winery in the world,

the one that no book or article on the subject could possibly afford to omit. That is Calatrava’s extraordinary,

curving and rippling Bodegas Ysios, nestling on the plain beneath the mountains of the Rioja Alavesa. Gehry’s

wineries, when they finally arrive, will perhaps be more spectacular in the way now over-familiar to us from his

Bilbao Guggenheim and his other buildings: but Calatrava’s will, I believe, be the one that sticks in the mind as

the most successful three-dimensional advertisement for its wine – in the jargon of the tourist business, a

“destination” in itself. It is an audacious building, openly reflecting the equally audacious architecture of Antoni

Gaudi more than a century before. As an architecture critic, I find it just too showy and somewhat crude in the

details. But then, so is the Sydney Opera House, and look what that building did for an entire nation and

continent.

What do all these buildings – all in their way “high

architecture” – portend? The books do not tell us a

great deal about the actual business of wine-making.

The manufacturing side, apart from the occasional

note as to whether the process is pumped or gravity-

fed, or whether storage is underground or in climate-

controlled sheds, is largely taken for granted. Some-

like the Gehry and Botta buildings – fall into a house

style and could equally be buildings for other purposes

by the same architects. There is no reason related to

wine-making why Mario Botta’s Petra winery should

have a great flight of steps ascending its roof to

nowhere in particular: that is an entirely architectural gesture. As with all architecture, some of these buildings

crave classical symmetry like the Palladian farmhouses of the Renaissance Veneto – often with lower wings

either side of a central hub. Others adopt the accretive, more Gothic, approach, the seemingly random jumble of

buildings generated perhaps by existing site conditions. Many contain restaurants, tasting rooms and shops for

customers: no point having all that expensive architecture if nobody is going to come to see it.

There are those who find humbler wineries, with nothing much by way of architectural ambition, more

immediately appealing than the great modern cathedrals of wine now being built such as Ysios or Petra. The

black barns of many New York state wineries are just agricultural buildings, indistinguishable from the

neighbouring buildings producing maple-syrup. It is a giant leap from such down-home producers to the mighty,

often conglomerate-financed palaces celebrated by these books. It is a relief to find that Richards, in his book,

actually recommends particular wines from each winery he describes. In general his “Wineries with Style”, is

more discursive than the others, which tend to adopt the project-by-project structure so often favoured by

architecture books. It also has a useful index, which for me is an absolute necessity. Neither Michael Webb’s

“Adventurous Wine Architecture” nor “Wineries – architecture and design” by Hans Hartje and Jeaniou Perrier

bothers with an index. On the other hand all the books apart from Richards’ include explanatory drawings as well

as photographs.

Is any of these a clear favourite? Not really. Three make a convincing case for themselves. If your French is up to

it, and if you can track it down, “Caves – architectures du vin 1990-2005” is a good primer and best for drawings

and bibliography. If not, and you like to drink the stuff as well as looking at pictures of where it is made, then

Richards’ is very accessible. From the purely architectural point of view “Wine by Design” is a concise and

informative romp through the genre. The other two are slighter works.

Without doubt there will be more books on the subject, just as without doubt there will be ever more new wineries

by “signature” architects marking the sometimes intense competition between brands. Apropos of which, surely

Northern Spain holds lessons for us all. The concentration of high-design new wineries there tells us everything

we need to know about the revival of the region from both a wine-making and a political standpoint. When the

Bordelais, in the mid 1980s, looked West to California and scented competition they must have little thought that

they would before long be turning their troubled gaze southwards.

Earth Architecture and Wine

Saturday, December 8. 2007

Many wineries and residences among vineyards employ earth in the construction of buildings. Often, the same earth to

grow grapes is ideal for use as a building material.

National Wine Centre

Vineyard Residence

Residence at Meteor Vineyards

Bodega en Los Robles

CLOS PEGASE WINERY AND RESIDENCE

1984 - 1987Calistoga, Napa Valley, CA, United States

The Clos Pegase Winery, located near Calistoga in Napa Valley, California, includes a visitors’ center, a working winery and cask storage, facilities for wine-tasting and special

events, and a residence for the owner on a hill overlooking the vineyards. The winery building itself is organized in two wings entered from a central portico. The working winery is serviced from a separate exterior courtyard and leads to caves for wine storage beneath the hill. The architectural character of the winery is reminiscent of southern European agrarian buildings, which control and filter sunlight and relate to the landscape through their colors and materials. Commissioned as a result of a 1984 artist-architect design competition sponsored by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Clos Pegase also features display space for the owner’s extensive art collection, both within the buildings and throughout the surrounding landscape. It received a National AIA Honor Award in 1990.

Related Links

Clos Pegase - Estate Winery

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