Center of Unity: A Ring-Shaped Winery in Kayamandi Where Production and Public Life Share One Atrium

Most wineries are organised like factories with a tasting room bolted to the front. Center of Unity starts from the opposite premise. It treats the circle as a social instrument: put everyone around the same centre, and the building stops sorting people into workers, guests and locals. The result is a ring-shaped winery whose courtyard doubles as an amphitheatre and whose roof becomes a hillside anyone can climb.

Designed by Szymon Łydkowski, Jakub Kruk and Adam Okuniewski, the proposal was selected as an Editor's Choice entry in Pour 2020. Set within the vineyards of Kayamandi, it combines a working winery with a restaurant, tasting spaces, accommodation, cultural areas and landscaped terraces. The designers are explicit that unity is not a theme applied after the fact; it drives the form, the circulation, the landscape strategy and the programme.

Production Goes Underground So the Hill Can Stay Public

The section is the most persuasive drawing in the set. Barrel storage and fermentation tanks occupy the lower levels, pressed into the vineyard hill where earth mass steadies temperature. Above them sits a terraced, slatted volume, and above that, a figure stands on the roof at sunset. The stacking reads as a clear hierarchy: wine is made below, people gather above, and the roof belongs to the landscape rather than to the building.

Partially sinking the winery is more than an environmental gesture. It lowers the profile of what could have been a bulky industrial object, letting the structure read as a calm horizontal line among the fields. The slatted upper layer filters light and views without walling off the vineyard, which keeps the production core hidden but never disconnected.

A Ring With No Front Door

Seen from a path between vine rows, the building appears as a planted ring wrapped around an open courtyard, with mountains behind. The circle removes the idea of a primary elevation. Instead of presenting a formal façade to arriving cars, the curved perimeter faces the vineyard in every direction and responds to the surrounding rows of cultivation. Orientation comes from the centre, not from a front.

Inside that ring, the multifunctional atrium does the real work. Its stepped edges serve as amphitheatre seating for concerts, presentations and outdoor film screenings, and large stairs carry visitors from the courtyard up onto the sloping green roof. Circulation becomes the public experience: a climb through terraces and viewing platforms that gradually reveals the vineyards and the town beyond. Roof, stairs and courtyard merge into a single inhabited topography.

Hospitality Scaled for Both Lounging and Bunking

The interior views show how the programme stretches across different audiences. A lounge with a leather sofa, round table and ring pendant lamp faces a glazed wall onto the vineyard at sunset, a billiard table visible beyond. The pendant quietly repeats the plan's geometry at the scale of furniture, and the glazing keeps the landscape as the room's main event.

The dormitory is a sharper statement. Stacked sleeping pods with ladders and white curtains sit beneath a timber beam ceiling, with a parent and child passing through the corridor. Including dormitory-style accommodation alongside a wine lounge signals that this winery is not reserved for one economic tier of visitor. It is a small but telling move that backs the project's claim about bringing people together regardless of background.

A Fixed Point in the Agricultural Grid

The masterplan places the ring within a vineyard plot beside a road and nearby housing, while three circular floor plans show the building organised entirely around its central atrium. That adjacency to housing matters: the winery sits close enough to the community to function as a civic room, not a remote estate.

The plans also reveal the discipline of the concept. Every function is reached from the shared centre, so the different user groups occupy one architectural environment without needing to follow identical routines. The circle works as a landmark in the agricultural landscape and as an inward-facing social space at the same time.

Why This Project Matters

Center of Unity takes a word that usually lives in mission statements and makes it spatial. The circular plan, the sunken production levels and the climbable roof all serve one argument: that a winery can be a piece of public infrastructure as much as a place of production. The atrium-to-roof sequence is the project's strongest idea, turning the act of moving through the building into a shared civic experience.

For a building type often associated with exclusivity, that ambition is worth noting. By setting dormitory pods alongside tasting lounges and placing an amphitheatre at its heart, the team proposes a model in which wine tourism and local community life overlap rather than coexist politely. It is a clear, legible concept, executed with enough restraint that the vineyard remains the protagonist.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Szymon Łydkowski, Jakub Kruk, Adam Okuniewski

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Project credits: The Center of Unity by Szymon Łydkowski, Jakub Kruk, Adam Okuniewski Pour 2020 (uni.xyz).