Architecturally speaking, in New York City, my home for the past 13 years, how a building figures into the cityscape, into the context of the buildings in its immediate orbit, is very nearly as important, in any aesthetic appraisal, as the architectural merits of the building itself. This has always been the challenge of designers of large structures in Manhattan, and perhaps why, in order to stand out, ambitious developers in the last century built so damn “big” and why ambitious developers in the present century are building so “different.”
The countryside is another matter altogether. While other buildings certainly do matter, an architect’s chief intersectional concern is how a building figures into its surrounding landscape. And when that larger natural context happens to be an enormous sunken valley flanked by craggy limestone massifs, a picturesque basin bathed in sunlight for most of the year, with unobstructed panoramas at every turn and virtually non-existent urban sprawl, well, then you have the makings of an architect’s dream come true.
I am talking about Rioja, of course, whose striking natural situation is difficult to understand fully unless it’s laid out before you. Home to at least two dozen major architectural projects, both finished and unfinished, Rioja is something of Spain’s golden crown when it comes to winery architecture, bejeweled with buidlings by Hadid, Gehry, and Calatrava among many others, with room for more.
This, I think, is what cultural writer William Snyder was getting at in his fresh look at Spain’s ‘architectural winery’ phenomenon, “Bold Bodegas: Top Architects Change the Face of Spanish Wine” in today’s Wall Street Journal, when he writes:
Winemaking and avant-garde architecture might seem like a strange combination. After all, the standard style of a Spanish winery for hundreds of years was a simple stone Romanesque structure. But the unspoiled countryside surrounding the region’s wineries attracts celebrity architects with the lure of a blank canvas. “In many of these areas there isn’t much commercial development, so architects can make a bold statement,” says Genevieve McCarthy, owner of cellartours.com, a luxury wine tour company.
I was pretty stoked to see so many of my own obsessions covered in a paper with such wide readership, a fact made even sweeter by the fact that I heard through the grapevine that Mr, Snyder had perused Blame it on Rioja while conducting research for his article.
Apart from discussing the idea of the Spanish rural landscape and its attractiveness to big-name architects as an architectural blank canvas, much of what Mr. Snyder presents here has been written about before. Entirely new to me, however, was the fact that the Iberian peninsula was home to another flowering of winery architecture in the early part of the last century, a politically-informed and aesthetically rigorous program of winery cooperative design engineered by a protégé of the great Catalan architect, Antonio Gaudi:
César Martinell designed Spain’s first wine “cathedrals” in the Penedès region south of Barcelona in the early 1900s. His modernista designs, which feature sweeping parabolic arches atop brick columns and large windows, were inspired by the radical left-wing politics of the time, and were meant to give laborers a beautiful place to work. Many of these wine cooperatives are still operational, producing small-batch wines and cavas.
The facilities of today’s architectural bodegas may not have been express-built with the experience of the worker at front of mind, but judging by what I have seen at every stage of winemaking operations at Rioja’s new generation of bodegas, I imagine that they, too, are indeed beautiful places to work.
