At the foot of a vineyard beside the River Havel in Werder, Germany, undjurekbrüggen builds HAIN, a pair of agricultural volumes caged in fieldstones salvaged from a road that no longer exists.
Werder an der Havel is set in a region whose ground has been throwing up stones for as long as anyone has farmed it. At the foot of a vineyard here, beside a biodiverse stretch of the river, undjurekbrüggen has built storage and production facilities for an organic wine estate. The brief was ordinary. The answer is not: two structures made almost entirely from natural, recycled, local and renewable materials, designed to keep earning their place after the wine has stopped moving through them.
For centuries in Brandenburg, frost and cultivation pushed fieldstones to the surface of the soil. Farmers gathered them and put them into foundations, churches, barns and roads; whatever was left over was heaped at the edges of fields, and those heaps became biotopes. HAIN takes the practice at its word. Its layered facade and roof are built from Feldsteine salvaged from a nearby road that was demolished, held in a cage of horizontal larch battens and tensioned wire that leaves every stone visible and every gap open.
That openness is the point. Plants, lichens, birds, insects and amphibians are expected to move in, and the building will look different in ten years than it does now. Foliage from the tree it stands against already reaches across one corner. The studio treats the finished object as a starting condition rather than a result, which is a rarer position than the language of ecological building usually admits.
Inside, the mass of all that stone does the work a climate system would otherwise do, holding wine storage steady. The supporting structure is undried local larch. Clay carries the rest: brickwork, the cap ceiling, the rammed-earth flooring. Foundation and ground floor are reused fieldstones and brick, with no concrete and no composite materials anywhere in the assembly. On the upper floor the winery's technical installations sit in a reversible layer, so that the day they become obsolete they can leave without taking the building with them.
The second structure reads as an extension of the grove it stands in. Living trees are combined with cross-cut larch trunks mounted on a subterranean wooden foundation, carrying shelving and storage for the winery's equipment and tools, with translucent corrugated panels stretched between them and a red press standing on a brick paved floor. More trees were planted to thicken the grove. Where the first building borrows the logic of a stone pile, this one borrows the logic of a stand of trees, and both are legible as the thing they imitate before they are legible as buildings.
What HAIN proposes is small and entirely tangible: not a building that reduces its harm, but one that is worth more to the surrounding life the longer it stands, and worth something still once the vineyard is done with it.
