A winery adjacent to a railroad

One of the nine projects that make up the Memory Houses.

The winery building was designed by a son for his father, an avid wine enthusiast who had begun planting grape vines on the site ten years before. Directly referencing the nearby Telescope House, the building consists of a series of nesting gable forms, each containing one part of the linear winemaking process. The structure is strategically sited at the crest of the hill above the vineyards.

A continuous slab foundation unifies both the individual gable volumes and the transformation of grapes to wine. The steel frame of the fermentation building establishes a direct structural relationship between the building and the fermentation tanks. The cast concrete volume of the cask storage building inverts the spatial, tectonic, and light qualities to allow for the wine to age. The bottling building prepares the wine for travel. The winery represents life.

Design: Robert Hutchison, 1994
Drawings: Sharon Fung, Marika Meinen, Hillary Pritchett
Models: Xiaoxi Jiao, Jackie Hensy, Kejia Zhang
Visualizations: Tristan Walker
Location: Wye Mills, MD

Sources:
Telescope House + Wine Process