Winecenter Caldaro
Winecenter Kaltern
Southern Tyrol / Italy 2005-2006
A new shop called the "Winecenter" has been constructed for the Winegrowers' Cooperative in Kaltern a well-known town on the Southern Tyrolean wine route. The project submitted by feld72 emerged from a selected competition and was ceremoniously inaugurated during the 100 year anniversary celebration
of the Kaltern Winegrowers' Cooperative on 24 June, 2006.
The new building can be found at the entrance to Kaltern at the end of a row of wine cellar buildings
directly on the wine route. As a landmark on the way from Bozen to Lake Kalter, it takes into consideration
both the mobile aesthetic of the 21st century as well as the local identity. The height development
of the monolithic corpus mediates between the tall main building built in 1911 and the smaller buildings
added in the past decades, creating an intimate courtyard through its L-shaped floor plan. The surface,
made of colored concrete reinforced with fiberglass, spreads out around the exterior walls and roof,
emphasizing, along with the flush window surfaces, the monolithic character of the building. Tension
arises between perceiving the uniform shell and the single large interior space which it encloses. Here a
sculptural landscape unfolds, with its height development alone creating a complex progression of
atmospheres and spatial impressions. Inside, a veritable wine tour is recreated with fluent transitions between different levels of exploring the product of wine: the path leads from the sales level on the ground floor by means of the lower situated mezzanine with the special wine selection up to the village pub with step-seats and a new interpretation of the local bay window; following this, the path continues further to the lounge hovering above the sales level and finally to the special tasting room constituting the highest point and also the endpoint of the spatial development. The sculptural ceiling landscape is made out of facing concrete, acacia parquet and glass, drawing a pronounced figure in front of the reserved white background of the shell. This landscape provides the necessary framework for the natural colors of wine. Entering into a dialogue with the architecture, the furniture made of acacia wood was specially designed by feld72 for the Winecenter. As a permanent artistic intervention, a series of works by the artist Andrea Varesco are positioned within the space.
The Winecenter Kaltern by feld72 was presented at the WineArchitecture exhibition in the Architekturzentrum in Vienna 2005/2006 and will further be presented at the Fondation de l'Architecture et de l'Ingénierie Luxembourg and this Autumn at the Deutsches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt.