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American
Heritage Center and Art Museum
University of Wyoming, Laramie 1986/1993
Throughout Wyoming there is a sense of landscape in formation, of landscape in transition. The appearance of this "archival" mountain can be thought of as parallel to the slow but certain geologic upheaval. This new mountain is detailed like an airplane wing and is aerodynamically positioned with respect to Wyoming's omnipresent winds. Openings in the cone are abrupt and limited. Smoke issues from its apex. The asymmetry of the mountainís stretched cone guides visitors to a common ground between the American Heritage Center and University Art Museum, the two halves of the building. The entire structure is set on a man made mesa, a surrogate landform that absorbs archival and curatorial spaces below the public realm. This archival mountain is axially linked to Medicine Bow Peak to the west and Pilot's Knob to the east. A web of site-specific alignments anchors the building into the campus and landscape. The art museum is reminiscent of a village at the foot of a mountain. It is poised on the mesa, with spruce trees on a bermed embankment establishing the foreground. The building axis that links the two distant mountains, the "rendezvous axis," recalls the gathering of native Americans, French trappers, and early European settlers. Now it is a place of intellectual and social rendezvous. At the core of the mountain is a hearth with a timber armature that guides the flue up through the mountain to the sky. The floor levels wind around the hearth, each level rotating, creating a spiraling ascent to the sky-lit aerie. |
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