Enoteca dai Tosi Design Contest
The formal system characterising the project comes from a corpus of references of different kinds, concurrently certain and universal, linked to the soil.
Shapes which are able to tell about Matera itself and its ancient culture but also about the qualities of such a complex product as wine, strongly rooted to its growing support. The extraordinary variety of the Italian wine landscape it’s indissolubly linked to the peculiarity of the lands from which it comes and from it’s proper culture.
Land changes, wine changes.
Since the entrance to the building a flight of stairs sinuously twists and turns inside the hollow volume: the stair is a sculptural element which adapts itself to the excavated nature of the sasso and origins itself a sequence of concave and convex rooms which are reverberating at every level. The flooring in artisanal cotto tiles incessant but changing into darker shades, is following the visitor through the visit, connecting different rooms and allowing a functional distribution of flows. The use of cotto tiles and glazed ceramic, in addition to represent one of the oldest conservation and transportation methods of the wine -but also olive oil- reveals the deep relationship established between the peculiarity of each wine and the earth from which grape plant grows. It underlines a clear link between the preciousness of ceramics and wine quality.
In the same way the flooring of the sasso is characterised from that variety which transmits high visual and perceptual value and represents the complex and rich oenological heritage which the Cantina Dai Tosi will transmits to their customers.
Other archaic references characterising Matera’s landscape: primitive cisterns, canal treatment systems, rock engravings, excavations. The whole Matera and its territory.
Jars, wineskins, equipment to support them, other digs with cylindrical sections. Enopolium from Ancient Rome. Then modern cisterns for wine-making. Them all. Then the materials. Then softly insinuate.
