Located in the city of Kaliningrad, Russia, which was badly damaged during WWII, Alliance 1892 is a warehouse and museum of wine and a brandy distillery, a symbol of rebirth and creation built by the architects of the Totement/Paper office.
Starting from the notion that the main material of wine and brandy is the vine, the architects Valeriya Preobrazhenskaya, Levon Ayrapetov, Diana Grekova and Yegor Legkov, from the firm Totement/Paper, decided to build on this trait by designing Alliance 1892. Through opposing and complementary symbols, internal and external, feminine and masculine, high and low, open and closed, wood and metal, they imagined a wooden factory of maternal stature, with a metal extension, pointed proudly towards the sky, and a rectangular opening in the horizontal part of the building allowing the curious to take a look. The whole is rigorously geometric. Each line, horizontal or vertical, is connected to the main project: the distillery, protected by grids announcing the creation of a park, like a new line about to take off. Inside, besides the store, there are offices that blend into the background and whose task will be to receive guests and meetings, in a spirit of creation and rebirth. Another dominant trait: the plant, recalled by the wood and the surroundings, able to symbolize the role of the plant in city life.
