Calgary, Alberta, Canada | Type: Commercial | Size: 12,500 sf | Year: 2018
Fabricated from 16 km of polyethylene rope for Railyard Brewing in Calgary AB, SHED was conceived as an architectural folly and is characterized by lightness, ephemerality, permeability and ultimately, temporality. Embracing these notions, we began a critical inquiry into how we could exploit an everyday, off-the-shelf material like rope that would elicit new readings with respect to its materiality, tectonics and form, while producing a whimsical architectural pavilion that could contract, expand or perhaps even move to another location.
Over 10,000 individual lengths of black rope define a monolithic cubic massing that only upon closer inspection into its interior, reveals the subtraction or carving out of a shed form that echoes the industrial typologies typical of a rail yard. While the overall form loosely defines space such as the taproom – where the public can sample the brewery’s various offerings – procession in the way of movement into and out of the pavilion is intentionally ambiguous creating a sense of curiosity, intrigue and spectacle.
Through creatively exploiting this everyday material into architecture, we were able to provide an innovative yet cost-effective solution for our clients that is not only flexible in its programming, but anticipatory of the future needs of the brewery.