Ramona Becker
Wine Museum in Bingen
Since the 10th century, wine production has been central to the culture and economy of the small town, Bingen am Rhein. Today, with a population of about 26.000 people, Bingen is a unique centre for wine production in Germany and forms the heart of a vital industry and tourism in the local area.
The thesis proposition for a Wine Museum draws on this history to offer Bingen a hub for wine culture and enjoyment. The museum includes a museological programme that presents various aspects of wine production and culture to the visitor. As an extension to this programme, the museum offers two other public services: a conference centre and a spa. The latter provides various functions for bodily relaxation and enjoyment.
The building programme and the architecture are developed on the basis of bodily and sensorial culture coupled with an idea about densities of experience.
In a conventional sense, museums collect and store artefacts for posterity. With wine, this is largely impossible, and the question of wine culture shifts the focus on body culture, sensing and the aura that wine consumption is imbued with. The proposal internalises this complex and offers a complete environment where the different functions are housed in architectural settings that offer different atmospheres, degrees of intimacy and relations to the body.
The museum is located along the promenade on the riverside that stretches from the historical museum and park and eastwards. It is organised into three leaf-like volumes that form a trefoil; each separate volume houses one of the three main programme units: the museum, the conference centre and the spa. In the interstitial space between the lobes of the trefoil, the common, public programmes are situated. These include amenities, shops, a café and a restaurant. The outermost surfaces of the lobes are glazed and offer stunning views of the surroundings with the river Rhein, the sloping hills and vineyards surrounding the town.
Through a graded use of materials, different zones in the building produce very different atmospheres. This material articulation of the spaces work with the architectural form and scale of the interiors to produce the effect of variation in experiential intensity. This is referred to as densities of experience. The design strategy for developing this variable architectural density was derived from a study of knitted forms. Textile knitting operates on a principle of looping and knotting, and the knitted structure can be loose or dense pending the tightness of the loops. In the building this translates to an equivalent loose or dense composition of architectural form. This is combined with the scheme for a graded articulation of materials to engender varied atmospheres for the different programmatic zones.
The building is constructed from reinforced concrete for the central and lower areas. The three lobes consist of a steel frame-structure and are clad with aluminium and glass.
The programme is broken down into commercial, experience, and communication categories. Sub-categories of these programmes are distributed within the building according to the principle of densification and temporal variables. The building has three principle zones: a hybridized zone which is the public area, a composite zone which is the semi-public area and closed zones which comprise spaces for more intimate, bodily experience. The activities and functions that take place in these three zones are coded according to temporal extension and speed so that, for instance, the spa offers the slowest programmes. The wine museum offers a series of standard events, like wine-fairs and festivals, as well as wine tasting and learning programmes about wine.