I’m driving in the French countryside, north of Le Muy. I’ve been invited by a friend of my neighbor’s to receive an introduction to his job as a wine bottler. Entering the drive into the winery, I am met by a long allée of towering maples, turning my view vertical as I glance up at their spidery overhangs. Out the other end, I pass a chateau, a modest affair, closed for the off-season. I drive along a dirt path that brings me to a parking lot. This is the start of my understanding, learning the connection between the process of winemaking and the process of architecture.

Behind the chateau are two large sheds with high-bay doors. I walk toward the first shed, past palettes stacked 8 feet high with glass bottles glistening in the flat ambient light. Entering a dim space, the whine of a motor reverberates in the large hall as a small forklift maneuvers. Beyond, several workers are gathered around a battery of brightly lit stainless-steel machines. Various hoses on the floor wind their way like a band of drunk pythons. Gerrard looks up and strolls forward, welcoming me with an embrace. 

We start in the back, where large horizontal metal casks are arranged in tight rows. These, Gerrard explains, are the crusher/destemmers that are fed by a series of hoppers and chutes. His finger traces hoses that lead from there through a series of processes, which are beyond either of our vocabularies in the other’s language, that eventually attach to a series of filters, then to a row of 20-foot-tall stainless-steel fermenting tanks. Hoses from these tanks lead out to a second set of filters that connect to another set of fermenting tanks on the main floor, one for each type of wine. These are the tanks that feed the bottling machine via another hose. Today, they’re bottling white. 

I follow Gerrard back out to the main floor, taking care not to trip over the hoses as I do. I note the quick-release end fittings like those used by firemen to attach hoses to their truck or a hydrant. I mention this to Gerrard; he chuckles. But the seemingly crude industrial nature of the process so far is counterbalanced by the finer mechanical workings of the bottling process to follow.

Gerrard walks me through it. The whole series of contraptions reminds me of the automated donut-making machine in the children’s stories of Homer Price. On a wide conveyor, a palette of bottles jockey for position on a single-file feeder belt into the first machine, the wine-filling station. What looks like a section of a giant drill bit laid horizontally advances the bottles, its concave spiral grooves moving each bottle into position, where it is grasped by a series of radially organized, rotating mechanical grips. Orbiting this merry-go-round, the inside of each bottle is rinsed via a jet of water and then dried by injected air before joining another merry-go-round for the filling of wine. Pneumatic hisses, rotary whirrs, and mechanical hums accompany the rattles of glass. Gerrard stops the machine to verify the amount of each fill; it is accurate. As the machine starts up, each filled bottle is injected with air again before being corked via a pneumatic feed from a cork tub nearby. The bottles then pass through a scanner that prints the “consume by” date before proceeding to another machine that drops a capsule on each bottle to be sealed tightly by a subsequent set of rollers. The next machine applies labels before finally depositing each bottle onto a packing table. Gerrard stops the machine when he notices the spacings between the front and back labels don’t match. He squints at the bottle, punches a few buttons on the keypad above and restarts the machine. The next bottle comes out, and he grabs it. “C’est parfait,” he says with the hint of a smile. 

I gaze at this whole setup, fascinated by the process, the ingenuity of the mechanics, and the care exhibited by Gerrard and his colleagues to ensure quality results. It all seemed remarkably similar to the architectural process. Here in the winemaking process, its beginnings seem vast, messy: the extensive labor of preparing the fields, of picking the grapes, of collecting them into large casks to be destemmed and crushed, jettisoning the detritus, and the remains going through various cycles in accordance with the vintner before being filtered and fermented in large tanks to await the proper time for its consumption. But from there, it all gets scaled down with precision to its final form: a bottle of wine with a cork, a capsule, a consume-by date and a label, to be served at the time and place of our choosing. 

Architecture involves an analogous process of converting the crude into a product with purpose, manipulating raw materials to serve our specific human habitation needs and desires. Rock outcrops are broken out and scaled down to slabs, and then into pavers, countertops, tiles; ore is mined and converted into molten metal, rolled into structural sections, fabricated into screws and fittings; trees are felled and milled into timber and wood studs, or flitches for veneer paneling. At each stage, the process becomes more refined, measured to the scale of the human body, the human touch; each labeled and marked in the coordination of directing it to its final resting place. The design process is similar: it also starts off vast, messy, as the constellation of ideas are numerous around the principles of firmness, commodity, and delight, like how a vintner considers tannins, balance, intensity, complexity, and length. Much matter—sketches, models, studies—is “wasted” in this pursuit. But once a design is arrived at, the development becomes clarified, edited, filtered. Architects are trained to lead this whole process, envisioning and then directing a symphony of materials to achieve the right pitch. 

But as the architectural profession has become more complicated, so has the process. Beyond the legions of engineers and builders, specialists from many fields have joined in, from waterproofing to lighting to software, and the architect can often be relegated to the role of simply making sure everyone is on the same page. And then there is the ever-present client, who nowadays, given the complexities of contemporary finance, are better termed as clients who many times have competing interests. Does an architect provide a service or a product? Clearly, both. But in a time where it leans strongly to the former, witnessing this winemaking process reminds me of how closely architecture still embodies the latter: the skills, the vision and expertise, the craft—qualities that are necessary in the making of anything meaningful. With the ever-increasing division of labor involved in the production of architecture today, can architects reclaim making? 

I bid au revoir to Gerrard and go outside into the late afternoon light. I find a bench, sit back, and view the vineyards, the fields, as the ranges of the Maures rise and fall in the distance. Before me is the land, the source of all we make. Perhaps the answer is within the work itself. As consumers, we receive the final product but are many times unaware of what’s involved before it gets to us. So much of what we consume is not understood; as the layers between the product and the sources mount, we’re increasingly removed from such understanding. As I write this out, I witness letters appearing on the screen at the tap of a key, as opposed to observing the mechanics of typebars flying—or, more viscerally, the weight of pressed graphite on paper. Maybe the speed of life today demands and enables such advances, but it also glosses over the mechanics of work. We see the results but can be ignorant of the process, and thus can underappreciate most of what we consume. It’s just there for us, every time we walk through a door, or uncork a bottle, or see it displayed in the footcandles of our invention. 

But architects can challenge this condition by pricking the consumers’ curiosity through an architecture of sensory legibility that can incite inquisitiveness, provide the opportunity to understand making. This seems increasingly prescient in a time where so much in our material world is concealed behind the facades of our imagery, by the micro-scales of our technology, and the hidden back stages that support it all. This condition works against legibility, the ability for the public to learn through heuristic experiences. Concealment in architecture, like technology, can create momentary wonder, but like a magic trick, it can slide into novelty, wear fast, and become ubiquitous, whetting our appetite for more such things. This condition is analogous to where we are today—in a constant state of expectation—satisfying one of the five features of what Guy Debord defined as the “integrated spectacle,” incessant technological renewal. The symbiotic relationship between increasingly shorter attention spans and our voracious hunger for the “new,” fed by ever-faster forms of fashion to furniture to content, bear this out. 

But the workings of machinery, like that I observed in the bottling of wine, is legible, and architecture can be similar. I am reminded of point 25 in Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, where he advocates for not cleaning your desk, as it allows for the opportunity to discover, to “find something that you can’t see tonight.” The open assembly of structural members, the logical pattern of stacking stone and brick to form a load-bearing wall, the repetitive geometry necessary to navigate an organically undulating floor, the considered interface between different materials—this all provides information, tells a story about making. Revealing such attributes creates a legibility for how things work, a form of expression, and at the scale of a building provides opportunities for learning, over time, to continuously see something you didn’t notice last night.

All photos by the author.