La Vigilia Winery is a 1,700-square-meter production and hospitality building in Los Chacayes, Mendoza, where a sequence of dark concrete volumes mediates between the ordered geometry of vineyards and the expansive presence of the Andes. Designed by Gonzalez Olsina & Vega Arquitectos, the project treats winemaking as both an industrial process and a spatial practice of duration, control, and ritual.
La Vigilia Winery Technical Information
- ArchitectsGonzález Olsina & Vega Arquitectos
- LocationThe Vines of Mendoza, Los Chacayes, Tunuyan, Mendoza, Argentina
- Gross Area1700 m2 | 18,299 Sq. Ft.
- Project Year2022
- Photographs© Luis Abba
Material, light and shadow construct the transition between the immensity of the landscape and the silent interiority of the temple.
– Gonzalez Olsina & Vega Arquitectos
Landscape Setting and Architectural Presence
La Vigilia occupies a broad agricultural plain in Los Chacayes, approximately 85 kilometers southwest of Mendoza. Vineyard rows extend across dry, ochre terrain toward the Andes, establishing a landscape defined less by enclosure than by long views, seasonal change, and the infrastructural order of cultivation. Against this expansive field, the winery adopts a low and horizontal profile. Its mass is read from a distance as an interruption in the vine grid rather than as an object detached from it.
The building’s exterior is organized through dense, black-pigmented concrete volumes, whose visual weight counterbalances the site’s openness. Rather than competing with the mountain range, the architecture relies on compression, darkness, and measured horizontality. A weathered steel crown runs across the upper portions of the composition, introducing a warm tonal register into the predominantly grey-blue and earthen setting. Its oxidized surface relates to autumn foliage, exposed soils, and the mineral coloration of the foothills, while also registering weathering as part of the building’s long-term presence.
Landscape design extends this material calibration into the forecourt and perimeter planting. Gravel, native grasses, lavender, santolina, and low shrubs establish a sparse ground plane that does not obscure the building’s base. The planting mediates between irrigated vineyard cultivation and the more rugged vegetation of the surrounding valley, allowing the architecture to sit within, rather than above, the productive terrain.
Program as Production Facility and Ceremonial Sequence
The winery accommodates fermentation, aging, bottling, laboratory work, administration, tasting, meetings, and social gathering within a single operational system. This mixed program requires a careful distinction between technical efficiency and public experience. Production spaces must support the movement of equipment, vessels, staff, and harvested fruit, while hospitality rooms require a slower sequence of arrival, orientation, and observation. The project addresses these different demands without treating them as separate buildings.
Four equidistant solid volumes organize the public and administrative program: an entrance hall, tasting room, meeting room, and production offices. These contained rooms project from the main production bar as legible spatial anchors. Their regular spacing gives the plan a structural rhythm and clarifies the relationship between enclosed hospitality spaces and the more expansive productive center. The arrangement avoids a conventional front-of-house/back-of-house split by placing visitor functions in close proximity to the processes that give the building its purpose.
Access is divided according to use. Workers enter through a direct route designed for operational clarity, while visitors approach through a more deliberate sequence connected to the forecourt and landscape. This slower route frames the winery as a sequence of thresholds, views, and controlled encounters with production. Tasting and gathering are therefore positioned not as isolated events, but as activities informed by fermentation, storage, maturation, and the labor required to sustain them.
Threshold, Circulation, and Spatial Rhythm
A row of freestanding black concrete fins forms the principal entrance before a rougher exposed-aggregate wall. Together, these elements create a semi-covered passage in which solids and voids alternate along an axis. The fins filter views of the sky and vineyard while casting long shadows over the walkway and wall. This movement through repetition gives arrival a measured tempo, turning a practical entry sequence into an architectural device for adjusting from the open landscape to the darker interior.
Beyond the threshold, an axial forecourt organizes paths, gravel beds, benches, water, and planting around a radial paving geometry. The layout formalizes the approach without imposing an urban plaza onto the rural site. Its lines draw visitors toward the entrance, while the surrounding vegetation and open edges maintain visual continuity with the vineyard. The forecourt operates as an intermediate landscape, neither field nor enclosed courtyard, where the scale of the agricultural territory remains present.
Internal circulation continues this distinction between efficient movement and deliberate observation. A connective spine links reception, tasting, meeting, and production spaces while allowing each to retain its own atmosphere. Glazed partitions and openings establish visual relationships with the cellar and fermentation hall, making the productive core perceptible from social rooms. Circulation thus becomes more than a service element: it calibrates degrees of access, visibility, and duration across the building.
Material Expression, Structure, and Controlled Light
The material palette is deliberately compact. Black-pigmented concrete gives the exterior volumes a dense, monolithic reading, while bush-hammered and exposed-aggregate surfaces introduce variation at closer range. The roughened concrete reveals mineral aggregate and formwork traces, resisting the smooth abstraction often associated with dark facades. Weathered steel marks thresholds, crowns the volumes, and forms elements such as the spiral stair, where its oxidized finish is experienced at an intimate scale. Timber, stone, metal framing, and polished concrete floors temper this heavier palette within rooms intended for gathering and work.
The fermentation hall forms the project’s operational center. Rows of tapered concrete tanks occupy the length of the space, accompanied by terracotta vessels used for aging. Above, dark steel trusses and catwalks establish a working infrastructure that supports observation and maintenance. A glazed laboratory is inserted within the depth of a Vierendeel beam, allowing technical supervision to overlook the production floor. This structural integration makes the laboratory both an instrument of control and a suspended viewing position, connecting scientific work with the physical processes below.
Light is handled as a restricted resource rather than a uniformly distributed condition. In the entrance colonnade, raking daylight sharpens the rhythm of the fins and exposes the tactile differences between concrete, gravel, and polished floor surfaces. Deeper inside, illumination is concentrated around tanks, circulation routes, and workstations, while walls and ceiling structure recede into shadow. This reduced light level responds to the environmental logic of storage and aging, but it also gives the production spaces a focused character in which material, vessel, and labor are selectively revealed.
About González Olsina & Vega Arquitectos
Gonzalez Olsina & Vega Arquitectos is an architecture practice based in Mendoza, Argentina, led by Charly Gonzalez Olsina and Eduardo Vega. For La Vigilia Winery, the practice developed an architectural approach that brings material, light, and shadow into a calibrated relationship between the vineyard landscape, industrial production, and ceremonial interior spaces.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Landscape Design: Eduardo Vera
- Construction Company: GR Housing
- Engineering: Ing. Patricia Gamez
- Project management: Integra CPM
- Collaborating architects: Cecilia Blanco, Nicolas Telechea, and Bianca Brescia
- Lighting fixtures: Aspen Lumiere
- Sanitary ware, faucets, and surface finishes supplied: Hiperceramico
- Aluminum joinery and glass: Mendoglass
- Paints and textured finishes: Materiales Gaudi
- Metal structures: Arquimetal
- Timber: Grupo Forestal
- Marble: Hiperpiedras
- Marble: Puromarmol
- Faucets: FV
