An institutional Armature: creating common ground for an American Prairie City

Abstract

Architecture is an art of building relationships. These relationships may exist among environments of land and buildings, between society and the individual or between individual and their beliefs. In all of these, there must be a sense of place that not only provides a ground for these relationships but one that nurtures them.For example, as the small towns of the Midwestern prairie face growth by the influx of new populations, as the people become more mobile and transient we risk obfuscating those places where community happens. If our cities become dissonant environments of land, infrastructure and buildings, our communities will become dissonant as well. The balance which preserves us as individuals within a society will be lost if we permit any manner of stewardship of these lands. If we are to preserve this relationship and express our ever-changing culture we must maintain very high expectations of our cities.It is the contention of this project that the agreement of individuals to constitute themselves as a people, to share the place they live, means that they also must stand in a coherent relationship to each other. Creation of that relationship, of that place, is an architectural problem.