In a beautiful text from 2002, Eduardo Souto de Moura lays out the history of architecture as a ravishing tale about weight loss, matching its pivotal moments with the adoption of progressively lighter constructive solutions. In the long run, such technical feats would be able to launch architecture (and ourselves) towards the heavens. This appears to be an old intuition, stretching from egyptian and greek antiquities to roman bricks and frescoes, from the heavy paleochristian basilica to those slender gothic buttresses, from neoclassical windows to the industrial repetition of elegant iron columns, from the liberation of Le Corbusier’s domino house to the “infinite pallet of plasticisms” in the eighties. 

The proposal for the Lanciano vineyard draws on this question in a different light. What if those heavy doric drums, so eagerly carved like fabric to the extent of becoming females in their prime (caryatids), could finally fly for real?
The pavilion is entirely built in wood. Vertical elements are surrounded with a white cloth. Vineyards are all around.

1 SOUTO DE MOURA, Eduardo, “Sobre a Arquitectura de Jean Pierre Porcher e seu atelier”, Topos, 2002, Braga

Team:

Architects: Nuno Reis Pereira

Client: Festival Concêntrico

Team: Manuel da Pedrada, Martin Dalsgaard Nicolaisen, Nuno Reis Pereira

Images: Nuno Reis Pereira