BIG has been announced to lead the design of a new whiskey distillery in Georgetown, Kentucky for a three-year-old local company called Blue Run Spirits.
The 35,000-square-foot distillery and adjacent 20,000-square-foot rick house structure dubbed ‘Meander’ will begin construction later this year at the Lanes Run Business Park located at the northeastern edge of the city, which is just 15 miles from Lexington.
Renderings appear to show a stream-like curved sequence of four interconnected pavilion-like forms with interiors framed by a glass curtain wall and landscaping on a site that is well integrated into the undulating hillside.
“For Blue Run, we have boiled the entire process of whiskey-making down to a single linear sequence - from distilling to maturing to bottling,” Ingles describes in a preview. “The half-mile-long process meanders through the gentle hillsides creating bends and banks, inlets, and outlooks. A single shingled roof of photovoltaic tiles twists and turns to maintain optimal orientation even as the activities underneath require grandeur or intimacy. In the same way the Royal Spring is shaped by how the water flows through it, Blue Run Distillery is shaped by the flow of the whiskey and the processes and people who make it.”
The company’s CEO Mike Montgomery told the Courier-Journal he hopes the project will serve as an important node leading to an expanded “spider web” of distilleries in the Lexington area, which is currently known as the end point of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail.
This project represents a new milestone as the firm's first-ever distillery design. Costs for Blue Run are reported to be $51 million. Construction is expected to be completed by the end of 2025.
3 Comments
Hmmm...very cool...look forward to seeing in person someday....$1,457/sf...must be good whisky I have never heard of...yet.
I was thinking same thing, seems like an unnecessarily BIG name and spend for a 3 year old company...
Boring and Irredeemably Godawful, this BIG project is yet another sorry scheme from the firm that seems incapable of distinguishing between “simple” and “simplistic”. The former is often very useful while the latter is always trouble. Sadly, BIG loves the latter.
Two generations past, a scheme of this sort would barely make through a second-year undergraduate final review. Why a company such as Blue Run Spirits would hire BIG for gigs such as these is beyond my ken (and barbie).
Having recently read in the NYT about how the citizens of Kentucky are fighting with “Whiskey Fungus,” (which has been a known problem since the 18th century), that covers everything in relative proximity to a distillery with a black and resistant-to-removal fungus, that reappears 18 months later, perhaps this scheme may improve from its future black veil. One can only hope. By then, BIG will be on to their next BIG simplistic solution to a complex program. “The Decorated Diagram” is much like The Whiskey Fungus -- it’s difficult to get rid of and it just keeps coming back.
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