atelier jørgensen's 'trailside winery' is a constructivist abstraction of the napa valley barn

atelier jørgensen learns from napa valley

The architects at California-based studio Atelier Jørgensen present a new, ‘constructivist’ vision of a typical winery of Napa Valley. As such, the design takes shape as an abstraction of the ‘standard faux-barn,’ which characterize the wineries commonplace in the area. Alongside the barn, the second standard building type in the valley are constructed as a ‘pre-fab steel shed,’ cloaked in a ‘scrim,’ or a coarse fabric tarp.

The architects describe the typology: ‘this winery strives to be an icon on its own while simultaneously allowing the surrounding landscape to become the dominant image to the visitor.’

visualizations by Mir | @mir.no

trailside winery: a blurred representation of the barn

Dubbed the Trailside Winery, the project by architects Atelier Jørgensen expresses a mismatch between its form and its program. The proposal is, in essence, a critique of the familiar typology, of what a winery should look like. The team asks: ‘should it be an icon, should it be an ephemeral ‘ghost’ in the landscape?‘ The resulting design emerges from its natural surroundings as a distorted representation, blurred and shimmering, of the familiar barn. Although the iconic form has been abstracted, it is intended to remain intact and in harmony with its context.

disrupting the icon

The architecture of Atelier Jøgensen’s Trailside Winery seeks to disrupt the faux barn. ‘The location is specific enough to be dislocated from its context, where the idea of what a winery looks like is deflected,’ the architects explain, ‘the very idea of the shape of a winery is decomposed and disintegrates before us.’

The group writes: ‘The displaced idea of a winery structure is instead destroyed and reconstructed. The form not only services its tweaked appearance but appears all the stronger for it. The form is produced by that tweak. It becomes unclear which came first, the form or the distortion. To remove the distortion would be to kill the form. They comprise one entity. The idea of the winery along the trail is both a geometrical object and an idea which fragments and manipulates the idea of structure and form.’

the team at Atelier Jørgensen reinvents the familiar barns of Napa Valley