The Pilgrim Brewer
Design Strategy
The goal is to derive the spaces of events out of the programme elements. One tool to accomplish this is collage, which supposes that drawings can generate previously unexplored intersections of images.
There are many sources of imagery from which to draw when contemplating brewing. The journey of John Barleycorn is rife with imagery, which in turn becomes suggestive of still more images: the aforementioned Passion Play, and Dante’s description of the pilgrimage through the levels of the Inferno. The brewing vessels themselves have a certain architectural appeal, and a certain unavoidable physical presence.
Architects Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake describe a lyrical approach to ordering architecture with words, describing gerunds—verbal nouns ending in “ing”—as a means by which reflections on a building may be structured. They describe the noun element of a gerund as stable, and the verb element as a dynamic element conveying the process. Kieran and Timberlake employ gerunds to structure the origins of architecture, stating that building crafts can be represented by the gerund nouns, which devolve outward by means of the gerund verb into the composition of the building.10
There are numerous gerunds evident in the brewing process: malting, mashing, lautering, brewing, fermenting, and conditioning. These will at once be the stable (noun) anchors within the programme, and the resonant (verb) epicenters from which the architecture will evolve from its craft origin to its outer building composition.
Starting with the John Barleycorn imagery previously described, layers of machinery, materials and text can be combined into vague approximations of space, corresponding roughly to the gerunds of the processes in the brewery: milling, mashing and lautering, brewing, fermenting, and conditioning. Remembering the urban condition, they also concern the relationship of the brewery to the street.
Milling
Mashing and lautering
Brewing
Fermenting
Conditioning
Transitioning
Facing
These collages are a means to exorcise numerous preconceptions about the nature of each space, and to provide traction for subsequent design investigations.
The search for Tschumi’s events does not begin at the nexus of each activity. Much like the brewing vessels themselves, these actions are undeniable and obvious. Where the collages become useful is in defining unexpected collisions of objects and images. These intersections can be subsequently pursued in both drawing and model.
The following drawings associate human-scale dimensions with notional sections derived from the collages.
Conditioning area
Conditioning area, enlarged
Passage from street
Passage from street, enlarged
Brewing area
Brewing area, enlarged
A subsequent model then provides an abstract structure around the layered images, making real the spaces between the collages. Like the notional sections, the model is naïve in its configuration of space, concerning itself instead with creating connections between the processes in the collages.
Abstract model of spaces between collages
Passage from street
Screening of mash tun
Vertical brewing space,
fermenters descending