Events in the Life of the Brewery and the Brewer
“What would it change in our arts, our sciences, and our technics if time were conceived as something real?...What is it about time’s relentless fluidity, its irreducible materiality, that the modern mind finds so impossible –or repellent –to think?“ -Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture
“According to my paternal grandmother, spring no longer exists, though her lament was as much sartorial as environmental: no more spring coats, you see, because no more spring weather. Actually, I suspect the change is in us rather than in the climate; our failure to recognize, let alone celebrate, the advent of spring owes rather more to the fact that we now live in centrally heated homes.” -Nigella Lawson, How To Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food
Qualities of Aged Buildings ("Thickness," and "Weathering")
Old Buildings and The Fullness of Phenomena: As I walked down the hall, the creaking of the floorboards beneath my feet whispered the slowness of my steps. Breathing deep, my nose let the musty spiciness of the wood fill my mind with visions of comfort and familiar. I paused at the large window, whose depth contained the sunlight in a single instant of warmth within the shadow
of the hallway. I prepared myself to leave my refuge and return to the rest of the world. Leaning forward to grasp the worn handle, my opposite hand reached to the wall for support. Cool, solid, and heavy, the stones were rough but welcomed my touch. With a grumble the door swung open. The bright light of the sky, softened by the overhanging arch of the door, compelled me out into the
courtyard.
Filtration/Refinement Diagrams: The City, The Building, The Site, The Brewery Machine
Although the alchemical and sacred history of beer-making connects it with cyclical, cosmological time; to our culture, it is also an industrial process related to the abstracted time-keeping of machinery and the linear progression of assembly manufacture. My early studies examined how this modern brewing process might be expressed spatially on the site. How could visitors to the building interact with the process through sight, touch, taste, and sound? I determined that the rythym of the events in the brewing process should be an autonomous time-keeping device by which the brewer and his staff and guests might order their days, weeks and months; and began to explore means by which the steam of the machinery and the flow of the systematically evolving liquids could be made visible and present to the rest of the city.
Photos: Making ink from condensing raspberry essence; execution of a store-bought home-brew kit
“’Fermentation and civilization are inseparable" – John Ciardi
“Brewsters quickly became priestesses and without beer, no one could commune with the goddess. Women oversaw the collective drinking of beer acting as barmaids and bouncers enforcing men didn’t injure themselves. Beer-drunken elder men became story-tellers reciting the tribal tales and histories. When the elders were in their cups, the women would awaken the children to sit and listen around the fires and in this regard beer became the single most important aspect in learning among preliterate cultures." -Allen Eames, The Secret Life of Beer! Exposed: Legends, Lore, & Little-Known Facts
Studies of "Event Details"
In my research, I discovered the idea of “event-time”. The African Nuer tribe has no concept for ‘time’ and no word for it. They associate time with activity.
We have these types of social clues as well – in fact, often when we are detached from our work or school or typical social circle, we lose track of days or months. My design project began to take shape as a building which might be organized by events in the lives of its inhabitants and the place surrounding it.
Final Design - Rendering at Night, from the water
Final Design, Rendering from the Plaza
Final Design - Site Plan and Section
Presently, the site is a boat club and parking lot, at the end of King Street in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. This site presented two primary opportunities. First, the importance of a site at the terminal end of the city’s main street, and its diametric relationship with the city’s primary landmark (The George Washington Masonic Memorial, at the opposite end of the street) meant that whatever intervention was made on this site would have to be in dialogue with the street and the Memorial. In addition, it should provide some public amenity as compensation to the city for filling such a prominent space. The site is also adjacent to a city park and the city’s public harbor. The proximity of the site to the river became an opportunity to make the river more present to the city than the current treatment of the site allows; and, to explore the relationship of the flooding, drainage, and filtering of water on the site to the process of brewing beer.
Final Street-Level Plan
The modern, Western world is largely built on concepts of time that are abstract, measurements and frameworks of time that are not observable in natural phenomena, and/or have no meaning outside of the subjective social and cultural importance we have assigned to them.
After my initial studies of the site and program, I began to search for ways that the building might facilitate or frame events in the life of the city and and the brewery.
The East-West orientation of
the project began as a diagram of connection between the city and the river; but it presented an opportunity for the daily movement of the sun to organize the
building and add meaning to the events occurring within.
Final Second-Level Plan
Final Third-Level Plan
A linear series of rooms, from East to West would be a sort of calendar or clock based on the events of the brewery, but juxtasposed with the movement of the
sun, which would sometimes be complimentary (as in the case of the Brewer’s bedroom being the room farthest east, and first to fill with morning sun, while his students’ dorms could be the farthest west, or last to fill with sun,
late in the morning after they had presided over their batches of beer through the night); or in contrast, (as the brewery machine could churn on through the night, with no sun at all, or would start and stop according to its own time, though
the sun steadily moved through building).
Final Design - Section Through Tasting Stair
Final Design - South Elevation
Final Design - Cross Section
Final Design - Cross Section
Final Event-Detail Sketches
From the beginning, the idea of thickness (of old buildings) - or thinness (of new buildings) - seemed very important in determining how a building might age,
and what meaning it might acquire. One of the primary revelations of my work, though it may seem obvious to others, was that the thin and fl at wall, did not necessarily surrender all of its ancient purpose to the machines that conquer fate and light and condition the space contained within the thin wall. Perhaps
a south-facing thin could be augmented by a screening system that presented opportunities for other events to take shape(a trellis for cyclical hops planting and harvesting).
Final Event-Detail Sketches
Perhaps a thin wall at a human-related scale, easily accessed by a permanent scaffold could celebrate the periodic cleaning and restoring of the building’s facade. The south wall would be a fl at curtain wall, bringing light into public halls and the living areas of the of the building, but shaded by a permanent structure on which hops could be grown and cleaning equipment could be temporarily attached.
Final Event-Detail Sketch
Final Event-Detail Sketches
The thick wall, still, seemed to provide the best opportunity to show the passage of time, and to create a cool, shaded space within the building to protect the beer once it left the brewery machine. These two notions of how the building might be conceived in time became the north and south walls of the brewery, framing the brewery machine that would reside in the core of the building. The
North wall, related to weathering and duration, would catch and channel water over its surface, staining and marking and mossing the face of the building and showing the passing of years. A solid masonry wall could be made thicker by supporting a massive stair, framed by still another thick wall holding kegs and barrels of beer as they age.
Final Event-Detail Sketches
Final Event-Detail Sketches
Final Event-Detail Sketches
Final Event-Detail: Tasting Stair and Tasting room in "Thick Wall"
Process Drawing - Section-Perspective
Process Drawing - Exploration of organizational strategies related to cosmological/natural phenomena and the Brewery Machine
Process Drawing - Exploration of organizational strategies related to cosmological/natural phenomena and the Brewery Machine
Process Drawing - Exploration of Scent and Taste in the Brewery
Process Drawings - Detail Explorations
Process Drawings - Plans and Sections
Process Drawings - Plans and Sections
Process Drawings - Plans and Sections
Research Sketchbook
The clepsydra became the first lasting organizational structure for the site. The intention was not for it to be a tidal clock that would make the natural cycles of the river present - but that it would provide an architectural and controlled manner for the site to become flooded every day. This flooding could come to be a datum by which people in the building and in the city would start to measure their days. The farthest basin of the final clepsydra, where the water first enters, is set below the average height of the river at low tide (-6’ from the elevation at the street level of the brewery building), which should allow water to constantly flow into the clepsydra, filling each successive basin hour-by-hour. When the final basin is filled, the system would become closed for an equal number of hours while the basins drained, and then the flooding could begin again.
Penultimate Plans and Sections
Penultimate Plans and Sections
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Personal/Academic Work: Timespace | Creating Meaning Through Temporal Phenomena
Masters Thesis - 2012 Virginia Tech
This is an examination of the significance of time and temporal phenomena in the conception and construction of the built environment.
Le Corbusier wrote that an original intent of painting was to create permanent evidence of events and things that passed away with time and were forgotten. He suggests that the camera is a much better tool for this, and so painting has lost part of its purpose.
Buildings and cities have always had the effect of retaining memory and creating cultural meanings, but reliance on continuous improvements in environmental and building technologies have obviated the building's ancient place as a datum through which human beings understand the passage of time.
A design for a brewery on the banks of the Potomac River became the vehicle to explore strategies for making time meaningful through the physical reality of the building, the brewing process, and the interrelated lives of the brewer and the city.
