Arquitectos
Virai Arquitectos

Ubicación
Logroño, La Rioja, Spain

Arquitectos a Cargo
Marta Parra, Juan Manuel Herranz

Presupuesto
11.292.757,45 euros

Área
6900.0 m2

Año Proyecto
2011

Fotografías
Jose Manuel Cutillas, Diego Carreño, Rafel Lafuente

Description of the architects. The Grajera Institutional Winery is located a few kilometers from the capital of La Rioja. The project seeks a balance between its representative character and its vocation to integrate into the landscape, avoiding both exhibitionism and excessive mimicry. The volumes are adapted to the accidents of the terrain and are broken by the proximity of the nearby forest, sticking to its limit and respecting the existing trees.

The existence of these two accesses at different heights allows the wine cellar itself to be half buried using the slope of the land, which favors aspects of the production process such as the constant temperature of the land, the use of gravity or natural ventilation. The materials of the building accompany these changes, passing from the luminous exterior to the dark stone interiors, in a didactic tour that participates in all stages of winemaking.

The building tries to find simple bioclimatic solutions, according to the climate and the place where it is located, which often have their origin in traditional constructions. In this way the habitable zones are located to the south, protecting the production and fermentation zones that are buried and covered by the hill, reducing in this way the needs of air conditioning.

In the inclined cover of the processing area there is a vegetal cover that, besides reinforcing the integration in the landscape, increases the thermal insulation of the same. The orientation and section of the warehouse allow to guarantee the natural ventilation of the building and to diminish the necessity of mechanical ventilations for the industrial processes tasting of the product. Within the construction systems used, the use of a ceramic facade piece designed by the Virai Arquitectos studio in conjunction with the Spanish company Favetón is noteworthy. The need to establish lattices that increase sun protection in the large glass facades of the institutional pavilion led to the search for a material that could behave visually homogeneously in the opaque façade areas and in the transparent latticework.