Herzog & De Meuron Dominus Winery in Napa Valley, California, USA.
Project type
"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.
ELENA FRANZOIA
HERZOG & DE MEURON ARCHITEKTEN
Rheinschanze, 6
4056 Basel
Switzerland
tel. +41. 61.385.5757
fax +41.61.385.5758
e-mail: hdmarch@access.ch
Links:
www.archinfo.it
www.greatbuildings.com/architects
www.architectureweek.com
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