This amazing building design by Hertzog and de Meuron on a wine farm in the Napa valley California, is 100m long, 25m wide and 9m high. The facades have gabion walls that cover the exterior walls, filled with local basalt of colours ranging form dark green to black. They form an inert mass that insulates the rooms against heat by day and cold at night. Natural light penetrates the interior through the gabion walls during the day and at night artificial light filters through the gabions to the exterior. The gabions offer varying degrees of transparency, more like skin than like masonry.
