Heronwood Farm is where it all began. Located in
Upperville, Virginia, part of the bucolic Middleburg region, the farm’s 400-plus acres were previously owned by entrepreneur and Redskins
owner Jack Kent Cooke, and my former partner, Robbie Smith, and I were retained
in 1983 by its subsequent owner to create eight initial buildings. These
included two major barns: broodmare and yearling; three small isolation barns;
a service building with bunk house; a large storage building forhay and
bedding; and a manager’s house.
Taking our cue and those first tenuous steps into the
world of specialized barn design from Morgan Wheelock, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based
landscape architect who’d been commissioned to design the site,
we incorporated his theories of natural light and ventilation into the
20-stall, 9,400-square-foot broodmare barn and 16-stall, 7,900-square-foot
yearling barn. Wheelock’s practices, which had improved
the health and safety of horses in the U.S., Canada, and France, helped
broodmares to cycle naturally and carry their foals to full term without the
fire danger and added cost of continuous, overburdened artificial lighting, sometimes
used as a stimulant. His passive barn systems also helped ensure that equines avoided
acquiring and transmitting respiratory ailments to the entire barn, as they are
known to do. Typically this is attributed to a direct result of conventional
barn ventilation, which is horizontal and achieved by opening the front and
back doors to catch the breeze. In this manner, each horse catches whatever may
be airborne from the previous horse. Random, ubiquitous, and ill-placed fans,
which are a common feature of many barns, only serve to exacerbate the process
by circulating bacteria, pathogens, allergens, and disease. To alter these standards,
Wheelock advocated siting barns perpendicular to the prevailing summer breeze,
something that precluded sick barns.
At Heronwood we utilized low vents and vented skylights—in fact, this project marked our first use of a vented skylight in a
barn—as well as heated by the sun roofs and eaves to
encourage upward ventilation. These principles were largely based on
18th-century Dutch-Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli’s equation of
vertical lift—created by the speed of airflow over an
airplane wing. The result we were looking for in our design was also facilitated
by the rise of hot air known as the chimney
effect, where air is pulled in low and vented out high. By
constitution horses give off a lot of body heat and humidity. Along with the heat
of the sun on the roof and skylight, this creates a heat differential between
the barn floor and roof ridge. As heat rises, the Bernoulli effect helps move
it along as the prevailing breeze blows across the roof.
Arriving at Heronwood in those early days, we were struck
by the prevalence of stone walls or fences that stretched as far as the eye
could see—accidental monuments, in a manner of
speaking, to the enterprising farmers and their descendants who had cultivated
and maintained the land and livestock for generations. In colonial days, occupants
would take the rocks from their fields and pile them up to create fence lines. Because
the existing fence lines would not work with the new paddock arrangement, however,
Wheelock dismantled the fences and we paid homage to the past by preserving the
stones for use in the new buildings.
Desiring to emulate the characteristic Federalstyle architecture
that defined the Middleburg countryside, we used that form as gabled end structures,
dormers, and other features in our buildings. The big question at the time was how
to take the shape and proportion that came from a residential design element
and apply it to horse shelters, which may be 200 to 250 feet long, 35 to 40
feet high, and 35- plus feet wide. In other words, how do we take the
Federal-style scale and context, apply it to a barn, and actually have it work
both aesthetically and in a practical sense?
We achieved this, in part, by using the dismantled stone
fences, along with locally sourced stone from Virginia and West Virginia to
create a shape at the end of the broodmare barn that imitated the Federal form,
shape, and proportion. This element became a recess to contain the barn’s pocket doors, emerging as a dominant form in the building that became
highly functional as well. In addition the same shape was repeated in the
dormer windows and other gabled roof forms.
Design-wise, we learned that psychology is integral to
the layout of a broodmare barn. It needs to be approached from the center through
a meeting place or reception room in which the prospective customer can relax and
learn about a horse’s stock or bloodlines. In a 20- to
24-stall barn, that reception room is typically located near the center of the barn’s long axis to balance the stalls on each end for more efficient
service by the grooms.
At Heronwood, well-appointed furnishings provided for the
ease and comfort of visitors, as there’s no denying that
value in the interior translates to value in the quality of the product being
sold. Conversely, with the yearling barn, the animal himself is being sold as
opposed to strictly the bloodlines, so there is less emphasis on a luxe
interior as the horse tends to be observed outdoors. Here, Wheelock designed a well-landscaped
and pristine show ring centered on the cross aisle of the yearling barn.
Clearly the most imposing and intriguing aspect of the
broodmare barn’s interior, and perhaps its exterior,
is the ridge skylight that runs nearly the entire length of the roof and barn.
In our quest to saturate the building with natural light—something elemental to efficient cycling of the broodmare—we decided a series of skylights might do the job, but what is
essentially a glass ceiling or continuous skylight would achieve the objective
seamlessly. In a broodmare barn, and in thoroughbred breeding, ideal conditions—those that don’t just simulate but actually
invite natural conditions indoors—facilitate the horse cycling
and foal dropping as early in the season after January 1st as possible. Because
a horse is classified as a yearling on the following January 1st, regardless of
when he was born in the previous year, one that has been on the ground and
livingtraining longer when designated as such tends to be a stronger horse. In
this regard, a barn created to court nature provides optimal opportunities for
efficient and expedient fertility earlier in the year.
Additionally, without skylights and their benefits,
handlers are known to enter dark barns, turning on lights at 4 a.m., to
simulate a sunrise. Lights may go unrecognized and remain on all day, building
up heat, igniting nests and cobwebs, inflating operating costs, and surely
increasing the risk of a major barn fire.
As thoroughbreds are delicate animals with sensitive
respiratory systems, keeping them extremely healthy and less susceptible to infection
was paramount to the barn’s ventilation. Accordingly, it was
sited perpendicular to the prevailing summer breeze so as not to encourage
airborne bacteria pathogens, and allergens to travel through. Next, employing
the aforementioned chimney effect and fluid dynamics principles of Daniel
Bernoulli, vertical lift, or an upward airflow, was attained by placing vents
along the floor and util
購物車/收銀台(0) | 在線留言板
| 付款方式
| 運費計算
| 聯絡我們
| 幫助中心 |
加入書簽
HOME
新書上架
