Looped: Ballard Technical & Vocational College Department of Beer + Wine + Spirits

• SCHOOL OF BEER + WINE + SPIRITS
  
  Students were asked to design a 40,000 square foot building to house the department of Beer, Wine & Spirits for the Ballard Technical & Vocational College, for the neighborhood of Ballard in Seattle, WA, USA.
  
  The program includes, tank rooms and storage for the brewery, winery and distillery, tasting room, offices for administration, shop, a large and a small lecture hall, greenhouse, agricultural garden, cold & dry storage and student labs.
  
  Students were asked to consider the urban response, as the site is located in the mostly industrial area of Ballard, which  is changing from industrial neighborhood to livable city, and therefore could benefit from a significant densification. The buildings surrounding the site appear to be mostly impermanent and will probably soon be replaced by tall mixed use commercial and residential buildings.

Ballard is a neighborhood in transition, changing from largely industrial to an increasingly densified urban fabric, with more mixed used retail and apartment buildings appearing  in the area in the near future. A new Ballard Technical & Vocational College will be inserted as an urban campus in the most industrial part of Ballard serving as a catalyst for this change towards this vision of an urbanized and denser Ballard.

This proposal for the Department of Beer, Wine & Spirits responds first and foremost to the issue of public space in Ballard, which the neighborhood severely lacks due to its industrial nature. The building is conceived as an extension of the street, with the main program of the brewery, winery and distillery arranged in a transparent loop that lifts up to the north through the building. A public walkway follows the loop all around, so the public can walk up and peek into the school activity. Public spaces are interjected into the loop between the three departments, serving the dual function of public tasting room and auditorium. These spaces are divided by interior and exterior garage doors, that can open up to completely unify the loop, enhancing the interaction between students of the different departments and the public, or act as completely open public spaces for performances and demonstrations.

The contrast between a controlled learning environment (especially that of a craft that involves controlling brewing, winemaking and distilling processes with a high level of precision) and an uncontrolled public space where people will be enjoying alcohol and inevitably become intoxicated is inspired by how beer was basically discovered by accident. Bringing this uncontrolled public space into the controlled environment allows for unexpected encounters and accidents to happen, and hopefully, the students will not only learn how to brew, make wine or distill alcohol in the traditional sense, but they will invent and discover new tastes and techniques, sometimes by intent and other times by accident.

The roof is equipped with an agricultural garden where the students can grow the ingredients for the product that  starts its journey at the top and eventually moves down through the building, from the labs on the top floors, through the tank rooms in the loop, and down to the ground floor as a product in either the bar, shop, tasting room or exhibition space. The roof also acts as a public campus quad for the urban campus, providing views of the area.

The facade consists of a knitted brick screen of light grey kolumba brick with varying gap sizes that open up or close down filtering the light appropriately according to the program, while giving the building a heavy presence on the street, but also light in the way that the upper volume will appear to be floating, and the solid will glow up at night.

- Chris Gotfredsen, 2011