Fetzer Winery Administration Building

Building main entry	Building entry facade	Building vineyard facade
Interior with clerestory daylighting	Main entry from inside	Interior with clerestory daylighting
Vineyard-side sitting area	Pise column, shading trellis, and wisteria	Office space
Sensor-controlled restroom lighting	Open central work area	Office space
Partition wall allows shared daylighting	Exterior overview with clerestory and rooftop photovoltaics	Building through adjacent gardens
Vineyard-side outdoor siting area	Building in context, across grape vines	Building in context, across grape vines
Building in context, across grape vines	Building in context, across grape vines

Exterior Panorama, South Exposure Pan by Dragging - Zoom in with Shift key - Zoom out with Control key Requires QuickTime.

"Set amidst the lush greenery of Northern California's wine country, the Fetzer Winery administration building reflects the from-the-land enterprise of its environment. Nestled amid colorful gardens, the building exists in picturesque shaded light, with a trellise gently shading its south side and a large overhanging roof accounting for the buidling's dominant form and function. Made from a variation on the rammed-earth-construction technique, Fetzer's new building is designed to be as self-sufficient as possible while adhering to California's conservation and seismic stability-minded energy and building codes. And yet this building is proudly simple, recalling the simple architecture that existed here centuries ago even as it reflects the latest in sustainable design expertise.

"The chairman of the board of Fetzer Winery, a guy named Paul Dolan, is a committed environmentalist who wanted to build a building 'off the grid', the electrical power grid. And we went about as far as we could go without fully getting off the grid. The the idea of rammed earth also appealed to Paul, and to me, as being very green, because you're essentially using materials that are right there on site. It's also a very energy efficient building, staying cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

"The building is a form of rammed-earth, but in fact it's a refinement of it in that you only have to build one form, compared to traditional rammed-earth, where you usually build two forms and ram the earth into it. The fellow who was consulting on the rammed earth construction, David Easton, came up with this idea, and prefers to call it 'pise', which stands for 'pneumatically impacted stabilized earth'. It uses the same technology that you'd use to build swimming pools, with a gun shooting a mixture of soil and cement. It's a very thick, heavy mixture that doesn't really sag that much. We wound up with an 18-inch-thick wall, with recesses for the windows and doors.

"Because of California's seismic requirements, the building is basically a post-and-beam construction with the walls adding very little structural support. There are concrete columns holding up the roof, and a concrete beam along the top of the wall.

"I'd also say one of the most successful aspects of the building is the daylighting. We designed the roof and clerestory windows to get as much natural light as possible across the full depth of the building. We built a physical model that was then studied at PG&E's research center down in San Francisco. It's passive solar to the extent it can be. That works well in terms of shading and lighting and diminishing the amount of heat generated from the outside. But you can't really cool it. In this instance, though, we used cooling coils that could be fed by glycol, because it's already used in the winery to cool the wine tanks. I don't believe it's been hooked up, but it could be."
— Tom Faherty, Valley Architects, interviewed by Brian Libby for ArchitectureWeek, 2003

Details

Address: 12625 Eastside Road, Hopland, Mendocinco County, California

Design Team

Architect	Valley Architects - details
Mechanical Engineer	Larkin & Associates - details

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Fetzer Winery Administration Building — Fetzer Winery Press Release

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