We are in South Tyrol, in Tramin, famous for Gewürztraminer wine.
The Termeno winery, founded in 1898 by the local parish priest, Christian Schrott, was architecturally reborn to a new life in 2010.
The project is inspired by the shape and movement of the screw.
Just like the latter, the extension seems to arise from the earth and envelop the existing structure, becoming its cladding.
The result is a metal sculpture that proposes the stylized design of the vine, in its morphology and function on the territory.
Like a vine that comes from the ground, with irregular branching, thinned out and of different lengths, where what prevails is the rule – absolutely varied and heterogeneous – of shrub growth; the shoots of the plant are the structural elements of the Termeno winery: they become its support, envelop the internal functions, redefine the image of the winery.
“The symbolic element – explains Werner Tscholl, author of the project – becomes an architectural sign to create an envelope that makes the building a sculpture, a work capable of signaling the presence and mission of the cellar”.
The South Tyrolean architect Tscholl has created a synthesis in which past and future coexist, wood and iron, glass and concrete, transparency and darkness.
The building is transformed into a natural element, a plant entity and takes root in the hilly soil, expanding the pre-existing building dating back to 1898.
With its absolutely traditional forms, the historical body in which Christian Schrott had started the business, grouping the many winemakers in the area, becomes the fulcrum from which the two wings branch off and serves as the entrance hall to the new spaces.
Covered with a grid of green painted metal profiles, the arms are tapered at the eaves: against the masonry – now centuries old – of the farm, they reach the lowest level and then rise again, decreeing their organic integration into the landscape.
In the Termeno cellar the external skeleton becomes the protagonist of the work.
Tscholl explains why.
“The cooperative has about two hundred members and for the approval of the project we needed a strong and clear message in which everyone recognized themselves.
To make wine they use the vine and the exoskeleton that we have built is its stylization.
With this assumption, the vine becomes the constructive fabric, well recognized by the members. In fact, the project was unanimously approved “.
Constantly pervaded by light, with the gaze turned to the valley and the green arms that ideally surround the vineyards, the architecture-sculpture inside is carefully studied according to its intended use, consisting of areas dedicated both to the activity of the operators both to the pleasure of visitors.
Two long corridors branch off from the original central body where the tasting room and the wine shop are located.
Looking out from these rooms, the foothills panorama amazes for its contrasts between the bright green of the earth in every season and the intense blue of the sky that frame the vines. Tscholl was able to graft the new intervention on the original body of the cellar without subtracting even a meter of land from the vineyards. An architect who can feel the places, who no longer wants to mark the South Tyrolean landscape with new buildings. He prefers confrontation with what is already there. This attitude and his works earned him recognition as architect of the year in 2016 by the National Council of Architects. The winery has won numerous awards, including the biennial in architecture, for its ability to combine oenology and design.
