Hotel + Winery

Hotel + Winery

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Fall 2013 | Professor Dana Cupkova 

Assignment: to design a hotel in the downtown, urbanized area of Ithaca, New York with a “plus program” while utilizing a parametric process.

Solution: A hotel that utilizes a terracing figure-eight plan in order to create two different “terroirs” for wine growth. The Voronoi exoskeleton allows for permeability of light and air the in, and also, the infrastructure for a wine-growth system.

Discussion: to support the local winery economy in the Finger Lake Region, this hotel serves as an urban hub of wine education  and commerce. Two typologies of room allow for a visitor to engage in the wine experience directly or simply to stay the night in the Westside Area of Ithaca. 

The form of this hotel originated from a morphological study of a sea anemone, and in particular, a study of bottom-dwelling sea anemones for their strategies to absorb light. As Ithaca receives marginal light in the winter months, bringing an optimal amount of light and air into the hotel is a primary consideration achieved by the unique exoskeleton and calculated terracing of the floor plates.Hot