Flying Doric | Nuno Reis Pereira

What if those heavy doric drums could finally fly for real? 

Nuno Reis Pereira

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Logroño, ES, 2024

In a beautiful essay from 2002, Eduardo Souto de Moura presents the history of architecture as a ravishing tale about weight loss, matching its pivotal moments with the adoption of progressively lighter construction solutions. In the long run, such technical feats would be able to launch architecture (and ourselves) towards the heavens. This appears to be an old intuition, stretching from egyptian and greek antiquity to roman bricks and frescoes, from the heavy paleochristian basilica to those slender gothic buttresses, from neoclassical windows to the industrial repetition of elegant iron columns, from the liberation of Le Corbusier’s domino house to the “infinite palette of plasticisms” in the 1980s.

The proposal for the Lanciano vineyard draws on this question in a different light. What if those heavy doric drums, so eagerly carved like fabric to the extent of becoming female figures in their prime (caryatids), could finally fly for real?

The pavilion is entirely built of wood. Vertical elements are surrounded with white fabric. Vineyards are all around.

1 SOUTO DE MOURA, Eduardo, “Sobre a Arquitectura de Jean Pierre Porcher e seu atelier”, Topos, 2002, Braga."