MAGAZINE ARQ 54 Wine vineyards cellars

Readings | Works and Project | Essays and Documents | Recent Architecture

The de-socialization of wine / Carlos Cousiño
Photos / Oscar Wittke
New geometries in old landscapes / Cristina Felsenhardt
Readings and translations / Cecilia Puga
Photos / Luis Ladrón de Guevara
At the beginning of the 21st century, new productive processes seem to be consolidating, if fragmentarily, on the Chilean landscape: tourist services, fruit growing, networks and communications. The wine industry is another of these incipient developments, bringing its own consequences –wine routes, changes in productive systems and infrastructure, entry to new markets, and the eruption of wine, bottled by the market studies that rule on who will like it, what they identify with, in the latest restaurants and tasting sessions. How do these new facts relate to the reality of our cities, and the architecture that is our task? How much will remain as heritage in the countryside? Is this part of a change in our urban habits? We look at the topic with equal enthusiasm and skepticism, beginning this exploration in our vineyards, surrounded, so photogenically, by toll roads, villages and wine cellars.

Winery in Los Robles / José Cruz Ovalle + Hernán Cruz + Ana Turell
In an increasingly sophisticated wine market, Chile’s first organic vineyard makes its appearance. As a closed, autonomous non-contaminating system, the wineries needed cellars that matched this approach in their materiality and the sustainability of their architecture. A reflective, environmental interest shifted to a problem of articulating densities, an unexpected merit of this project.

Los Maquis winery / Ximena Joannon + Cristián Sáez + Juan Ignacio López
Unlike the traditional vineyards, linked to the family property of land and mansion house, the new independent wineries define their identities more freely. Their modernity, or indifference to tradition, appears in the exploration of form in these wine cellars, a scheme of parallel aisles built in metal and exposed concrete. .

Wine tasting room / Paulina Courard
The activities in these industrial buildings have included a smaller-scale space with a highly public and intensive use –the wine tasting room, where the enologist works and receives visitors. Here the issue of corporate identity shifts from a façade seen from the highway to tactile matters,
and in passing raises the issue of hospitality. In this case, elements of traditional skills are recovered, in a clean, neutral space.

C y T wine hall / Alberto Mozó
In Chile, tradition linked wine and sociability. A disinhibitor, wine tacitly encouraged the urbanity proper to bars and family gatherings. But in this field, innocence has gone. Programmed by its producers, wine drinking has erupted in new urban activities, along with an adequate dose of Internet and new marketing strategies.

Santa Ema winery / Lorena Andrade + Alfonso Montero + Claudio Blanco
The relationship between architecture and clothes is more obvious at some times than others. In this case, the question was how to cover a regulated productive program that needed a certain volume of air and space for the movement of goods. Like a cloak, these wine cellars shifted the project’s problematic to the issue of surfaces. How the shell that shelters the industrial processes will be seen and constructed, and, in passing, how it will differentiate, position and sell the product created.

Vineyard's roofs. Taller Perú, summer 2003 / text: Teodoro Fernández
A world of limited resources and technologies in a friendly climate is explored in this joint workshop between the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile and Lima’s Universidad Ricardo Palma. The challenge was to develop a constructive system to create shade in three vineyards south of Santiago, using wood in small dimensions and simple assembly techniques.

Wine's museum / Alejandro Aravena + Charles Murray
Welcome to cultural pilgrimages –or, in the worst case, an unforeseen ménage a trois of leisure, capitalism and culture. Just as the visual arts vanguards blend into forms of expression despised until 50 years ago (Michel Gondry, thank you), so day-to-day topics slip into the spaces reserved for “high culture”. Is it an operation by big capitalist groups? Or a sign of the growing complexity of a homogeneous values world?.

Ecological rows / Teodoro Fernández
Architecture –and landscape architecture– operate on the basis of interventions, which seek, one way or another, to change the existing order. In this case, rather than proposing a new order this is an attempt to recover a lost structure, to defend biological diversity within the expanse of a monoculture. Interestingly, the effect of the reconstitution is to re-value the spatial structure of a valley, starting from its topography and the way the water moves through it.

Wine's landscape / Pierre Asselot
An exact, regulated brief and the availability of certain materials defined the first wine cellars built to exploit the wineries commercially. The representation of vineyard culture, related in the past to a territory organized productively as a system (mansion house, chapel, park, vineyards and farm workers’ houses), now seems to relate to simpler schemes of building and vine, which clearly focuses attention on the architecture of the building. Asselot offers a vision of those first vineyards as a place of production, rather than programmed creators of identity.

Benmayor atelier
Elodie Fulton
Santiago, Chile, 2002.

Barbecue and viewpoint
Tomás Cortese + Carolina Contreras
Zapallar, Chile, 2002.

One-family houses, Población Huemul
Diploma, Scholl of Architecture, P.U.C.
Jorge Rodríguez
Santiago, Chile, 2002.