Industrial Modernism

The original distillery was designed by Graham Baba Architects, Seattle, who returned for the new project. While a total of six new buildings are planned, so far the project features three industrial-modernist warehouses housing Woodinville Whiskey’s small-batch bottling, barreling and aging facilities.

In naming the project the winner in the Metal Buildings category, the 2022 Metal Architecture Design Award judges called the project authentic. Lee Calisti, AIA, principal of lee CALISTI architecture+design, Greensburg, Pa., notes the honesty shown in its structure and skin, calling it a “tectonic clarity to it that is just really nice.” Mark Roddy, FAIA, principal of Mark Roddy Architects, Sacramento, Calif., says the project shows the possibilities of metal roofing and a skin on a metal building. “It’s sophisticated, the fact that you can add that level of sophistication to a pre-engineered metal building system.” Rand Elliott, FAIA, president of Rand Elliott Architects, Oklahoma City, adds that the project is inspiring. “It doesn’t have to be just a metal building. It can have integrity, it can have good proportions, it can have a relationship to what goes on inside of it. This would be a great example for anybody. If all the metal buildings built today had this kind of quality to it, the world would be a better place.”

A HIGHER LEVEL

Key to the design was maintaining the simple, rectilinear gabled form and dark brown hue of the Woodinville distillery. The new structures are clad in dark metal siding and Kebony modified wood, and feature large, corten-clad sliding barn doors and bands of corten siding at key locations to evoke the warmth and character of whiskey.

Each of the 25,000-square-foot pre-engineered metal buildings from Butler Manufacturing, Kansas City, Mo., range from 40 to 70 feet wide by 400 feet long. The buildings also feature SLR 16-0 metal roof panels from Morin Corp., a Kingspan Group company, Bristol, Conn.; wood cladding from Kebony, St. Clair, Mich.; and corten metal siding supplied by Specialty Metals, Kent, Wash.

Susan Tillack, LEED AP, associate principal, architect at Graham Baba Architects, says using a pre-engineered metal building was the only way to complete the project with any efficiencies in cost and construction timeframes. “It also allows for the large-scale open volumes needed to support the program in the buildings, and it was important to all of us that the design would be honest, industrial, functional—and authentic, very much like the Woodinville Whiskey brand.”

And, she adds, “Pre-engineered metal buildings are taken to a higher level here, with attention to key details and a judicious use of materials where they really count—in places they can be touched and seen, on the entries and street-facing facades.”

MATERIAL SELECTION

The use of both metal and wood on the new facilities call back to the original distillery, which has elements of wood both inside and outside, dark brown siding and a metal roof. “The wood is located in places where it is most visible and where people come into most contact with the buildings—at the front of the buildings and at the entries—and has a warmth and tactility that offsets the harder, more reflective, metal,” shares Tillack. “Corten steel is used judiciously and sparingly on small areas of the building facades—the sliding barn doors of the barrel aging buildings and under the windows and at the primary entry of the processing building. The caramel-stained Kebony wood, bronze metal siding and roofs and rusted corten steel all have color characteristics that are reminiscent of whiskey.”

Materials were selected for their aesthetics, durability, sustainability, ease of construction and connection to the materials used at the distillery. Some steel and old growth Douglas fir stairs and stair railings were salvaged from the distillery and repurposed for the new complex, helping to create both a psychological and physical link between the two places.

The north facade of the process building features a large, semi-transparent “Woodinville Whiskey Co.” sign that announces the brand to passing motorists and further recalls similar signs found on the sides of distilleries and rickhouses throughout rural and agricultural regions from Kentucky to Scotland.

DESIGN DETAILS

One of the details that sets this project apart from other agricultural/industrial pre-engineered metal buildings is the eave-less “folding” roof detail on all the buildings, with a virtually seamless connection between the roof and the walls. “We worked very, very closely with the metal fabricator and roofing installer, reviewing numerous mock-ups and providing a number of iterative sketches to make sure this detail was executed with precision,” Tillack says. Another design detail included exposing the steel framing on the sides by pulling the wood wall back from the face of the facade. “The steel bents are cool—they express the structural forces on the building—and we wanted to celebrate that,” she notes.

“Along with providing some visual interest, recessing the front wall also gives the buildings some depth on the street-facing facades, and provides an armature for the wood cladding that can die into the side walls rather than having to be trimmed out with an additional layer of material—keeping the transition between materials as simple and straight-forward as possible.”

As a firm, Tillack says GBA had been interested in working on pre-engineered metal buildings for a while. “We were drawn to the challenge of taking what is a very common agricultural and industrial building type and creating a really powerful design statement by tweaking it with some simple and strategic design moves.”