My project deals with the design of a riding school including residential building for the owners, a winery and a camping site near Lacoste in France. The distance to the closest big city Montpellier is 50 km. The realization of the project has already started. During my diploma I established constant contact with the owners Brigitte Fourcadier and Thierry Montel to take their wishes into consideration.<br />Brigitte is a riding teacher who also teaches handicapped children.<br />Moreover, she organizes sport camps for children during the summer holidays. Thierry is a wine grower who produces both white and red wine.<br />There are two prime objectives the project wants to achieve: In the first place, it should create a meeting and communication point for the inhabitants of the neighbourhood who take riding lessons and secondly, it should attract tourists who, for instance, visit the winery for a wine-tasting session or want to stay a few days at the camping site. The project proposes the creation of a comfortable area in which people want to spend their leisure time. The two major elements of the draft are the structure of horse muscles and the structure of grape-vine. The overlays of these two structures show that their patterns are very similar. The structure of wine is interwoven with the structure of horse muscles. I analyzed these two elements and constructed the building frames out of them.<br />The volumetric transition is generated by the horse muscle structure.<br />The walls rotate along the axis of the horse muscle. The surfaces of the archetypal house are extruded and skewed creating the sculptural armature. The ruled surface maintaining this transition is repeated on several buildings. The buildings seem to nestle in their surroundings due to the assimilation. The designs of the buildings explore the integration of architecture into sculptural form. The building's impressions are pretty exotic and sharp and stand in contrast with the soft landscape. The dichotomies of the exotic forms and the assimilation on the soft formed ground are played out.<br />The riding school's very heart is a central meeting point. The meeting point interconnects the grooming place, the chill zone of the riders, and a stand to the riding place. Along with the meeting place for visitors of the riding school the architecture supports and encourages this collaboration and the participation of the employees and guests.<br />The meeting place is designed to fit seamlessly into its surroundings, whilst offering a place where people meet each other. This typology generates both a unique courtyard and visual connections.<br />
