AMELIA ISLAND BREWERY
Located on the busy A1A route into Amelia Island, Florida, The Amelia Island Brewing Company is an exciting commercial project for Tomecek Studio. The site, thickly vegetated with trees, shrubs, and grasses, is a natural hideaway in an industrial neighborhood. The project layout creates a physical and visual barrier around the site and directs the views and experiences inward towards the enclosed courtyard and preserved vegetation. One enters the brewery via the deck spanning over the large water feature recalling the memories of walking on a boardwalk over marshy Florida waters.
To understand what the brewery wants to be, we looked at the brewing process and distilled the concept to the idea of a container and liquid stored within. The production side of the brewery finds its character in the barrel – large, uniform, industrial and enclosed while the tasting room responds to a beer glass – intimate, tactile, diverse and transparent. The two parts of the brewery lay adjacent to each other on the site with a third element, liquid, joining them. The liquid is the sensory experience of the project, activating visual, tactile, olfactory, auditory and taste perceptions, as one moves through and engages with the building. The duality of the project reveals itself in the spatial qualities as well as in the form. The production space is enclosed by one curved roof while the tasting room contains the curved interior within a rectangular exterior shell.
