'PRAIRIE ART CENTER'
At Franconia Sculpture Park, the placement and form of the sculptures usually dictates what happens to the landscape around it. The Prairie Art Center flips the script, examining what happens when the environment can push back on the built environment.
This starts with a reintroduction of prairie grasses and trees to the site, helping it to better blend into its context. The program is then separated into its primary elements - a public gallery and private live and work spaces for visiting sculptors - with each area treated as a separate structure. An elevated path that flows between the different spaces lifts the structures off the ground and gives them the impression of floating above the prairie.
Each of these spaces is defined by its own framework and skin, which creates both a sense of rhythm and repetition as well as a unifying form that all the buildings share. The spaces embrace their surroundings by breaking this form, wrapping around trees and prairies that act like natural sculptures, complementing their man-made counterparts. Building orientation and skin opacity are manipulated to create view corridors to the surroundings, while the interiors are flooded with both direct and indirect natural light, giving them an airy, ethereal feeling that starts to blur the line between the outside and the inside.
Location: Franconia Sculpture Park, MN
Year: 2017
Type: Studio Project
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