Restructuring the Cantenac Brown winery

“The architecture of Château Cantenac Brown's new winery sets up a series of viticultural activities: harvesting, wine-making, maturing and tasting. These temporalities are accommodated in functional and poetic spaces, atmospheres and ambiences that facilitate the work of women, men and wine, silent and temperate, with appropriate lighting” Philippe Madec Architecte The structures of the new Chai de Cantenac Brown are hybrid. They are the answer to three questions that overlapped throughout the project: resources, context and performance. In this project, experimentation integrates the partial restructuring of existing buildings with no explicit heritage value but with memorial value, the use of low-carbon concrete, form-strengthened steelwork, the use of raw earth in the form of bricks and pisée, and the rediscovery of the design potential of solid wood structures. It was at the Doyeux Sablières Montpennaise quarry in Montpon-Monéstérol, 100 kilometers from the site, that the required qualities were found for the earth used in Pisé walls. The solid wood roof structure of the vat house is made up of a diamond-shaped sheet that is free in the middle. It is occasionally supported by triangulated pyramid-shaped trusses and beams. The solid wood sections were dimensioned using standard bolted sections. In the lower part, the galvanized steel structure of the vat house is set up according to the geometry of the vats, while supporting the timber frame. It is based on a low-carbon concrete infrastructure. The winery is a timber-framed vault, almost made of small timbers, designed in reference to the work of Philibert Delorme and “conceived from a double Fibonacci sequence based on the golden ratio to reduce the length of the straight pieces of solid wood as they reach the top in order to produce the curved effect” (P. Madec). Hybridization of constructive systems characterizes this project. It cannot, however, be associated exclusively with so-called bio- or geosourced materials, to the detriment of all others. It's simply a question of finding the right material in the right place, depending on the project and its production context.