Rabbit Hole Distillery in downtown Louisville, KY, designed by pod architecture + design (pod a+d) of Carrboro, NC, was named Grand Award Winner in the 2018 Metal Construction News Building & Roofing Awards.

As Grand Award Winner, the 55,000-square-foot distillery is featured on the cover and in the November edition of Metal Construction News (MCN) and online at http://www.metalconstructionnews.com/.

“We’re incredibly honored,” said Douglas V. Pierson, AIA, co-founder/partner, architect, and design principal at pod a+d. “This was very much a team effort – with the talented staff in our studio, with a progressive, visionary client, and with each consultant and vendor in a dynamic design and construction team.” 

In his feature in this month’s MCN, senior editor Mark Robins writes, ““The judges…were very impressed with both the distillery’s form and process, with two of them even saying that if they saw it from a distance while out driving, they would want to drive toward it to learn and see more about it.”

Completed in July, the building features metal louvers, walls, and roofing; cascading metal decking; perforated aluminum panels and staircase; a large, two-directional metal logo/sign; repurposed metal from an old building on the property; and other applications in various textures.  All of these elements are key components of an architectural design inspired by the physical process of making bourbon.

“From a farmer’s delivery of grain to the final bottle, the distillery’s design sequentially showcases bourbon’s complex process of milling, cooking, fermenting, distilling, barreling, bottling and everything in between,” Robins writes. “Via an open floor plan, a tour lets visitors see each of these processes unfold step by step, and share in the context of the architectural expression of metal, glass and wood surfaces.”

Pierson credits Rabbit Hole’s founder/CEO Kaveh Zamanian with insisting on transparency from the beginning.   “A design strategy of transparency was our way of showcasing in a modern way the complex process of bourbon making for all to see,” he said.

In keeping with Zamanian’s vision, the process takes place largely in an open manufacturing atrium. A 48-foot-tall still rises through the atrium in full view. A perforated-aluminum staircase leads to the Overlook Tasting and Hospitality space above the atrium.

Pierson and his partner/wife, design principal Youn Choi, worked closely with Metal Sales Manufacturing Corp. of Louisville. Together they spent nearly a year working out the details of every bit of exposed structural steel to make sure it reinforced the bourbon-making process.

Juror Lewis McNeel, AIA, of Lake | Flato Architects in San Antonio, remarked on the project’s “sheer variety of textures, and spatial and visual experiences that happen within the architecture.”

Pierson credits the use of metal for “allowing us to successfully integrate into the design process an expressive and integrated materials palette where each material is co-dependent of the other.”

For more on this year’s Grand Award Winner, see “Dynamic Distillery”  by Mark Robins, Metal Construction News.

For more information on pod architecture + design, visit www.podand.com.