Terroir
For the 12th time, the Concéntrico International Architecture and Design Festival is transforming the streets, squares and courtyards of Logroño into a laboratory for urban innovation. Among the more than 20 temporary installations on display from 18 to 23 June in the capital of the La Rioja region is TERROIR, the pavilion developed by Boltshauser Architekten & Garbizu Collar Architecture. The project combines architecture, art, materials research and public use with the question of what rammed earth is capable of achieving as a contemporary building alternative in Spain, and how a deeply rooted material logic can be updated through precision, prefabrication, material recycling and new forms of assembly.
Drawing on the region’s highly significant wine-growing tradition and local building culture, a compact pavilion has been constructed from rammed earth and reused wine barrels to serve as a ‘Climatic Tasting Chamber’, featuring vertically structured wall elements and arched openings.
Once their oenological cycle is complete, the barrels are first reused as formwork for the rammed earth walls and later as load-bearing elements for the roof, thus becoming fully integrated into the architecture. Earth from local excavation works is rammed down layer by layer to form modular elements that are prefabricated and assembled on site.
LÜCHINGER MEYER PARTNER Madrid oversaw the structural implementation of this unique combination of materials, focusing on load transfer, stability, jointing, modularisation, assembly sequence and constructability. The central focus was on translating the architectural ambition into a robust, comprehensible and, at the same time, resource-efficient structural concept. The combination of temporary use and a design intended to be permanent in particular required precise coordination between the design, material behaviour and structural detail.
