Sodium Design

Over the past several years there has been a boon of new craft breweries opening up across the country. While it has become commonplace for this to happen in cities across the country no place has seen the development of this building typology like Asheville, North Carolina. For the fourth year in a row Asheville has been crowned ‘Beer City USA,’ because of its high concentration of breweries in such a small population, 85,000. With the announcement of three major craft brewers locating their east coast operations in Asheville, a new building typology has many local architects clamoring to get their hands on such an interesting project.
This project, a 15,000 s.f. brewing facility, becomes a mixed use facility by integrating a restaurant and a tasting room alongside all of the amenities associated with a small, regional craft brewer. Articulated over the course of an entire semester moved from some initial research into brewing, through site research and ultimately though wall sections and model prototypes of the structural system. The complexity of the program was amplified as for many of the students, many in their third semester of graduate education, this was the first building that they had articulated beyond the initial form making process.

Consistently working iteratively through analog and digital modeling the process evolved and was tailored to each students strengths and weaknesses as a result a diversity of work is represented as well as media and techniques of representation.