R. Lopez de Heredia Pavilion

The adage that from small beginnings many things may grow applies well to this project. The client, famous family bodegas of Rioja came to us with the intention of designing a pavilion to contain an older pavilion. The old pavilion had been found in their outhouses and restored to its original condition. It had been originally commissioned by the great grandfather for the world fair exhibition in 1910. The proprietors of the bodegas had a long succession of adding their built presence to the tradition of the bodegas. The new pavilion was to be exhibited at the Alimentaria Fair in Barcelona and afterwards relocated to the bodegas at Haro in Rioja. In time the pavilion would be superseded by a new extension of cultural buildings. As such it was a stepping-stone, a bridge between the past, present and future development of the bodegas. For us the starting point was to jump into the future to determine how the present would evolve. We began this project by a series of studies exploring how the bodegas could evolve. Working backwards from these studies the pavilion began to emerge in tandem. The pavilion would house the past the old pavilion. Made from timber and designed in a fin de scele style the old pavilion became a jewel within a new container. Like a series of Russian dolls the new pavilion itself was to be eventually housed within the new extension at the bodegas. The new pavilion would be just one layer in a larger composition. Proceeding with this almost onion analogy, various studies led to a container developed in sectional cuts. The section distorts from a rectangle around the old pavilion to a distorted memory shape resembling a decanter. Which was not an intentional end point but once noticed it could not be ignored that we had designed a new bottle for an old wine.