Soave (Verona, Italy)
Located on the hills a few steps away from the walls of the medieval castle in Soave (Verona, Italy), the new Leonildo Pieropan winery is a dialogue between history and landscape, between contemporary forms, innovative technological solutions and traditional materials.
The winery was officially opened on April 14th 2022. Strongly desired by the founder’s grandson, Leonildo Pieropan, and named after him, the architectural construction was conceived as a workspace based on the essential principles of innovation and sustainability.
The implementation of the project involved the removal of more than seven million cubic feet of material from the side of the hill. The main volume of the building is now located underground and fits perfectly within the environment and the surrounding landscape.
This simple concept is a five-year mutual work that involved the owners, the architect, and Grassi Pietre as stone supplier.
The resulting structure of the winery presents a single long and sinuous multi-faceted limestone facade, similar to the fascinating local natural stone hills and characterized by chiaroscuro effects.
The material selected to create this effect was Giallo Dorato (Vicenza Stone) with a brushed finish and a thickness of 3 cm. Giallo Dorato was chosen for its durability, availability in quantity and dimensions, workability, color and particularly the specific fossilization of this stone.
Grassi Pietre supplied 15.000 square feet of cladding, for a total of 2300 pieces of stone elements all in different sizes cut with CNC machines. The elements were produced and pre-assembled in large sizes at the Nanto plant, to create three-dimensional prismatic structures, following the architect’s idea of evoking a coral reef emerging from the ground.
The stone slabs were finally installed in faceted columns with a ventilated wall solution to manage the complexity of the drawing. Customized installation safety brackets were used to support each slab and anchor it to the underlying steel structure.
To optimize the sense of monolithic continuity of the façade, all the joints between the stones were sealed with special mastics and silicones, in the same color shade as the stone.
In this project, Giallo Dorato acquires its key role as cladding, but also brings the site of the new winery back to its ideal state of nature. Corals, algae, and the shells of marine organisms that populated the seas of the valley fifty million years ago, are newly found today, thanks to Vicenza Stone, in the façade of the new Leonildo Pieropan winery.
Design: Arch. Moreno Zurlo – AcMe studio
Photography: Jürgen Eheim
In collaboration with: Progest srl
