Tasting room spiel

wall, originally uploaded by seamonkeylifeboat.

okay. I'll begin a little design spiel that I may cut short for one of two reasons: dinner(I'm starving), or the battery runs out.

Alright, so the tasting room is a rather strange shape. The building was engineered before it was designed, meaning that it was already under construction before an architect was hired to carve out some more public space. As a result the building is built like a small brick building that one might defecate in (this is a paraphrasing of a colloquialism in an attempt to avoid swearing--which I, as you all know, detest), but in some places the ceilings are only 6 ft tall.

Anyway the tasting room is two long and narrow rooms that form a sort of 'L' shape opening onto a large balcony overlooking the vineyard. In order to minimize the impact of the wildly varying ceiling height and encourage people to move through the space and out onto the balcony, we created a series of strong horizontal elements. In the crystal palace that laureL mentioned, the horizontal element is a "swarm" of green glass boxes which wrap around the green glass walls and flow into this teak wall. The teak wall bends around the corner and leads out to the balcony. The wall breaks through a glass wall that intersects both the teak wall and the 34' glass tile mosaic bar. The teak wall has another "swarm" of white boxes with acid etched glass that cut through the wall. The boxes will have suspended bottles of wine with lights behind them that all point out towards the vineyard, creating another strong horizontal element leading you out to the beautiful out doors.

okay. gotta go. battery is dying and soup's on.