Vineyard Perraudin

French architect Gilles Perraudin built a winery in the south of the town of Vauvert, which bears his name. This archetypal stone structure is located twenty kilometers from the Camargue Nature Reserve at the mouth of the Rhône River. To the north of the nearby city of Nîmes stands the famous Roman aqueduct Pont du Gard, constructed from the same stone as Perraudin's winery.
The simplicity and purity of the design can be compared to the spatial doctrine of Benedictine monk Hans van der Laan, demonstrating the latent presence of archetypal elements in contemporary architecture. Laan focused intensely on the foundations of architecture in the late 1960s, being strongly influenced by photographs of the southern English Stonehenge. The archetypal and symbolic significance of this grouping became the subject of his countless interpretations and reconstructions, as well as a source of extensive speculation. The druidic monument appeared in Laan's studies as a primordial building element delineating the relationship between architecture and nature. Laan faced a sense of losing touch with the origins of architecture. He focused on fundamental elements that are rediscovered and incorporated into the core of the project during times of crisis. In his study, he emphasizes the key role of trilithons (a trio of stones) as the beginning of ancient and noble architecture. A stone placed on a pair of upright stones is the first documented example of a monumental structure realized by humans. Laan noted that the arrangement of simple objects into meaningful groupings adds symbolic significance to the objects. According to him, architectural methods should not consist of creating things from nothing but rather respecting fundamental construction principles. Laan attempted to translate trilithic structures into his works for the Benedictine Order. The fundamental building elements of his designs represented a column, a wall, a cell, and a courtyard.
On similarly simple principles, the winery of Gilles Perraudin utilizes stone monoliths with uniform dimensions of 0.52 x 1.05 x 2.1 meters and a weight of 2.5 tons. The material used allowed no other choice than for the resulting building to be simple, massive, and eternal. Vertically erected and laid identical blocks create an environment that we thought had disappeared over the ages. The structure attempts on one hand to match the timelessness of ancient stone buildings, but on the other hand, its layout offers answers to today's practical problems. The massive monolithic building creates a favorable climate inside for aging the precious grape varieties of Languedoc, which require thermal inertia and avoidance of sudden temperature changes. Following the example of Mediterranean architecture, Perraudin develops the theme of powerful stone walls. He journeys back to the origins of stone architecture, where there is no distinction between load-bearing and infill elements, between columns and beams. The regular stone block carved from asymmetrical geological deposits loses nothing of its value. Heavy and massive blocks seem to have just emerged from the ground and created a pedestal measuring 30 x 30 meters for the stored wine. The stone facades open into the inner courtyard with a prehistoric colonnade, offering a perfect Mediterranean atmosphere. Despite the high consumption of building materials, it remains a low-cost structure utilizing local resources from the nearby quarry in Vers. Unlike later uses of stone for surface finishes, here the stone is returned to its original structural property.

Excerpted from the text of Prof. Alfonso Acocella 'Modern triliths: from Dom Hans van der Laan to Gilles Perraudin' from the book Stone Architecture; Ancient and Modern Construction Skills, Skira-Lucense, Milan 2006, p.624