visions 1

someone famous said something like "...without a vision, life is dull and wastes away..." or am I remembering that right...?

Here I am.   Dreaming of what can be.   My winery is a work-in-progress.  I see it finished and grand, and it comes into focus over time.  John Gardner said the most productive time he had as a writer was when he was doing woodworking in his shop.  He could 'vision' his story, and write it as he worked.  Well, I do the same.  When I'm in the vineyard, pulling weeds, stripping vines of suckers, I "see" the future.  It is one thing to 'see the vision', it is entirely another to get someone else to see it.  My day job is to help people do just that.  I am an Architect, and I 'envision' what my clients want me to make exist which doesn't exist now.  So, I 'see' and help them to see with my sketches.  This page is offered in the spirit of helping you, too, to see the vision of where this 'work in progress' might go. 

Oh.   I pin my sketches up at the office so I can look at them, and imagine existing what is only a mental vision of mine.  One of my partners saw it and asked me, 'Carl, are you building a Theme Park?'  Ha ha!! If only he had toured the caves of Stone Hill Winery in Hermann Missouri like I have!  Then, he'd *understand*!!!  Well, on with our exercise in imagining  what could be...

1.  How about a Bread Oven and Cascading Terraces?  To get better perspective we have to back up toward the house down the hill a bit, and look back west to the winery deck, and we can imagine two terraces...one halfway in elevation between the winery deck and the house porch, and the lower one the level of the house porch.

Here the bread oven grows out of the landscape,as if the wall bends and bulges a bit for our purposes.  I'm just about to relax, and I imagine the next thing I'll get asked is 'Where is the ramp?'  The ramp?  The ramp??  Well, there's enough snow, probably, still at Clear Fork that I can go up there and study the  rope tow.  There are great deals on heavy duty casters on ebay, and you can imagine (soon) the system of ropes and pulleys, and bread shelves on caster/pallets going up and down a maze of ramps. 

Hmm....

2. How about a Porch?  An easy porch?  Something retractable and colorful?

We're standing northwest of the winery here.  Imagine a pipe rail grid, like a simple trellis, and a roll down fabric awning. (Here is the power of imagination...THE PORCH NOW, JULY 28, 2004, EXISTS!!)  Imagine actually being done with the board and batten siding, the stone veneer.  Imagine the bricks laid on the patio in the foreground, Diane's flowers bursting into a kaleidoscope ofcolor...imagine the stone wall actually having been laid where the grade stepsthe garage doors.  You have to see the lovingly handworked stones of an Italian hill village centuries old and cared for to understand this temptation to build, build, build...you just hope somebody keeps at it for a thousand years or so...

3.  How about tunnels?  Vaults? 

Ben and I spent a summer dreaming of tunnels.   We got tunnel how-to books from the library, with detailed stories of tunnel 'failures'...you know, when the unfortunates burst through rock to an underground chamber of goo.  We called precasters about 4' diameter concrete pipe.   We studied vaults.  We were going to build a spring house vault out of bricks for practice.  We had a design for burying a Quonset Hut on a slope we have where a stripper oil well still produces one barrel of oil for our Oil Company every two months.  We figured out moveable forms for brick vaults for our new winery.  I sketched and sketched. 

The coup-de-gras of inspiration came to me when we visited Hermann, Missouri, and toured the cellars of Stone Hill Winery.   What a labyrinth of vaults and caves!  What Inspiration!!So, one night in Colorado, while the sun set and Ben was catching some trout, I imagined my winery and house connected by a network of caves and vaults..Enough to keep me busy for another lifetime!  But certainly finally with enough storage...

(please excuse the qualiity of sketch...I have to upsize it...July 28, 2004)

4  How about our own Italian (or West Virginia....) hill village?

5. How about the Winery and our House growing together?

I could never stand to be finished with a project...have to begin those tunnels or vaults soon...