Fences saturate the neighborhoods of South Central Houston. These barriers, commonplace in this city, allow views to what lies behind but deny the viewer access.
This winery, situated within this unusual urban context, acknowledges the barrier conditions around the site, and attempts to bridge the gap between private interior and public space through the program of an urban winery.
The site and campus incorporate a network of transparent site walls, fences, trellises, and reflective glass organized along the geometry of a maze. This maze extends across plan and section, where the barriers cut vertically to define walls, lift and sink to form circulation, and extend horizontally across the site to provide a monolithic structure. These semi-transparent fences also obscure orientation and conceal a matrix of centers. Each main program element is located within one of these spaces, and within each center is a uniquely expressed void. The visitor must traverse these centers, through the landscape of rotating grape vines, to reach each building, witnessing the steps of winemaking in the process. Conversely, the workers navigate a parallel network of private underground corridors, which interweave and interconnect the different buildings of the campus.
Though the site is based on the maze, surveillance, and voyeurism, the ultimate ambience of the winery is one of openness and tranquility.
This project plays with the gated, “see-but-don’t-touch” condition of Houston. It questions the way we perceive and the purpose and public role that a winery might take on within an urban context.
