Climatic Tasting Chamber

Boltshauser Architekten & Garbizu Collar Architecture
Entorno Iglesia de Santiago
2026

In La Rioja, earth is not merely a support: it is identity. It shapes the landscape, the vineyards and the ways the territory has been inhabited and built over centuries. As with wine, terroir can be understood as a collective construction in which soil, climate, time and human knowledge are inseparable. Brought into architecture, earth becomes a material capable of generating space, atmosphere and climatic comfort: its mass produces shade, coolness and thermal inertia.

Climatic Tasting Chamber proposes a pavilion built from rammed earth and reused wine barrels, conceived as a full-scale mockup of a circular, extendable construction system. Once their oenological cycle is complete, the barrels are reused first as formwork to compact the rammed-earth walls and then as structural support for the roof, becoming fully integrated into the architecture. The result is a construction with virtually zero CO₂ emissions: the earth comes from the site itself, is compacted with minimal energy and can return to the ground at the end of the building’s life without generating waste. Architecture does not consume material —it temporarily reorganises it.

Beyond its constructive dimension, the pavilion works as a Climatic Tasting Chamber: a space where wine is not tasted under neutral conditions but within the very environmental variables that give rise to it. Against the standardisation of conventional rooms, the building’s own mass and orientation activate real gradients of temperature, humidity and light, while the smell of reused wood and compacted earth turns terroir into a direct bodily experience, which can be extended with a locally sourced gastronomic offer.

Developed by Roger Boltshauser —an international reference in earthen construction and professor at ETH Zurich— together with Garbizu Collar, the project underlines the parallel between architecture and wine: both depend on time, care, local matter and a precise management of resources. To turn earth into architecture is to make visible what usually remains implicit: that wine is the result of a deep, climatic and patient relationship with the land.