Headquarters of the RBGO, Ribera del Duero / Estudio Barozzi Veiga

A very interesting project from Estudio Barozzi Veiga, a practice featured on our AD Futures series.

Headquarters of the Ruling Board for Guarantee of Origin, “Ribera del Duero”
Location: Roa, Spain
Years: 2006 – 2009
Competition: first prize
Status: under construction

The objective of this competition was to remodel an existing building and to extend it to accommodate the headquarter of the ruling board for guarantee of origin “Ribera del Duero”.

“Only the interpretation permits establishing proximity between things; the interpretation opens up the space of knowledge of those things. Approaching the real, can only be achieved through the interpretation as a prime act of knowledge.”
(Jean Granier, Art et Veritè, La nuit surveillèe Paris 1997).

The interpretation, as the principal search, gives capacity to the desire for knowledge that sustains the whole of artistic expression, while architecture, as a practicing art, can only be expressed constitutionally as interpretation, and the real is its space of knowledge.

As such, the project is simply founded as a unique interpretation of the reality of its place. It aspires to offer a space of difference where the things that compose its proximity –the city, the landscape, the atmosphere- are accommodated and which, as a mirror, reflects them.

The place has been carved by the city and the landscape, and the project, simply interprets this condition, outlining the difference that brings us closer to an understanding.

In this way, the building could be understood as a single expression of its surroundings, as an element of transition between the urban landscape, where it is inserted, and the natural landscape which confronts. The building moves in between those double tensions: it moves as it follows, adapts and finds an architectonic form for the meanings that synthesize the city and the landscape.

The project becomes a material conclusion of the existing volume, suggesting the need of a conclusive element that expresses the temporary disconnection of the new volume. This new element forms a dependent one, follows the lines of the old element and declares the impossibility of an authentic redefinition of its historic appearance.

From this element, attentive to the re-composition of the urban context in small scale, the project becomes independent and moves towards the large scale, towards the distant landscape, defining an independent element, able to confront the distance. An emerging element that provides continuity with the context, with its iconic elements and that establishes a dialogue with the horizon of the plateau and the monumentality of the landscape, identifying itself as a timeless monolith.

The materiality of the project, local stone, is seen as an intensification of the place’s character, allowing a subsequent sensory evocation of the landscape. The treatment of the openings suggests and opens up the space of difference, positioning the project in a radically contemporary condition.

The project rises in the threshold of the urban, and that is where the building meets the landscape and starts moving towards it, assuming the essential condition of architecture as a whole: gravity’s expression through its earthly needs and the inhabitation of a perennial navigation towards the distant.