How can a building rebuild a community? These questions guided the creation of Cycle House, a combined residence, community center, and vineyard nestled in Oregon's idyllic Yamhill County.
Cycle House was conceptualized through observations of the many cycles at play on this site. Some of these cycles are positive, like the change of seasons, the life of the vineyard's grapes, or the rise and fall of the hillside site, but others are negative, such the cycle of poverty and substance abuse trapping many rural Oregon families, and the poor working conditions for migrant farm workers who come every fall to pick grapes. The program seeks to address this multitude of forces at play on the site, offering a residence for the owner, a community center for locals to learn trade work that will give them access to the wealth brought by the wine industry in the region, and housing for transitory workers.
Rather than sitting prominently on the site, the program has been exploded from a single structure and scattered across the plot, taking cues from the path of boulders rolling down the hillside and coming to rest in the earth, eventually becoming embedded objects in the site. By separating the program and interlinking it through a series of paths, occupants are forced to consider the unique context of each day on the site and the minutiae of the passage of time.
Thus architecture, site, and program begin to meld with one another, creating a space for mindfulness and bounty that gives back to the community that hosts it.
Cycle House was conceptualized through observations of the many cycles at play on this site. Some of these cycles are positive, like the change of seasons, the life of the vineyard's grapes, or the rise and fall of the hillside site, but others are negative, such the cycle of poverty and substance abuse trapping many rural Oregon families, and the poor working conditions for migrant farm workers who come every fall to pick grapes. The program seeks to address this multitude of forces at play on the site, offering a residence for the owner, a community center for locals to learn trade work that will give them access to the wealth brought by the wine industry in the region, and housing for transitory workers.
Rather than sitting prominently on the site, the program has been exploded from a single structure and scattered across the plot, taking cues from the path of boulders rolling down the hillside and coming to rest in the earth, eventually becoming embedded objects in the site. By separating the program and interlinking it through a series of paths, occupants are forced to consider the unique context of each day on the site and the minutiae of the passage of time.
Thus architecture, site, and program begin to meld with one another, creating a space for mindfulness and bounty that gives back to the community that hosts it.