A Culinary Retreat and Centre for Cheesemaking

The project seeks to renew the traditions of construction and structure in architecture through poesis; the revealing and representation of concealed material presence. This renewal of tradition, beyond a technical necessity, engages with the making of place through a contextual material practice and representation.

The Culinary Retreat and Centre for Cheesemaking is developed from a fascination with structure and construction to create an architecture that can engagement with the long tradition of building, speak of the unique value of the productive and cultural rural landscape, and heighten the physical temporal experience between the user and their surrounding.\nThe mixed-use program of the Culinary Retreat houses a cheesemaking space and curing room, a multifunctional teaching space, and student accommodation. These function are organized within discrete volumes that negotiate the organic boundary of an existing field. Hedgerows mark the site threshold, with the new structures carefully following these contours. The strong sense of enclosure of this hybrid courtyard/perimeter typology reinforces our shared experience while the composition maintains the character of place.\nThe logic of earthen construction is the pervasive material presence of the design, forming the primary structural and constructive material. It is a primal and corporeal construction, reduced to the core elements of an architectural composition: wall, floor, roof and opening. The archaism redolent of earthen construction is achieved through the continuous mass of the form, openings are created by breaking this continuity, revealing the depth of the construction. The material reality of architecture is celebrated, the roughness, the texture, the play of light and shadow, to articulate an otherwise undifferentiated surface and geometrically primitive volumes. This stereotomoic mass of earthen construction echoes the representational capacity and material presence of the cheese that the project celebrates. \nThe unique spatial and atmospheric qualities, the material presence of the project, is the result of a rigorous exploration of the structural and constructive thinking carefully shaped to preserve and re-imagine the existing rural hedgerow condition. It is an architecture both archaic and modern that seeks an integral balance and appreciation of the built environment and our wider cultural environment.