Elevation Station Preview: Team TACKarchitects/Grey Plume

May 7th, 2012 : : : :

We began our Station with the idea of making representational connections between transportation and physical form, while serving the event’s function of seating 20 people. Craft, tectonic expression, sustainability, and sense of place or LOCI are paramount to our practice. We wanted to infuse these concepts along with our chef partner Clayton’s ideas of culinary art within our design. During our initial brainstorming session with Clayton, executive chef and owner of the Grey Plume, ideas related to memory experiences and emotional connections with food really started to take hold.

Our design direction coming out of these exploratory sessions resulted in the premise that by manipulating organic and bucolic materials in non-typical ways, a spatial and culinary experience could be created to strike a phenomenological connection with the visitor.

Visitors to our Station will have the chance to forage for their food over several courses.  The first course will allow guests to cut their own greens and add pickled vegetables, creating individual lettuce salads.  For the second course we are employing “preserved skewers”, cured sausage with heirloom vegetables, hung from above.  Lastly, the third course will consist of dehydrated meringues that guests can “harvest” themselves, also hung from above.

We are “Wrapping” our culinary experience with meaningful architecture to reinforce the notion of  memory experience and emotional connection. Using simple wooden pallets, ice blocks, hay bales, burlap, and recycled lumber, our Station will challenge the visitor’s typical understanding of these materials while facilitating the act of food presentation for the event.  Each of these materials will play to our senses through light, color, smell, touch…and eventually taste!

Over the past few weeks we began to collect materials for our Station. Our intent is that everything used to construct our Station is recycled, and will be recycled upon the conclusion of the event.  We are fortunate to have our offices located within the Mastercraft building in downtown Omaha. The building’s owner, Bob Grinnell, is allowing us to use an empty work bay to construct a full scale mock-up of our Station, so we can work the design kinks out ahead of the event.  Bob’s wife, Danna, also happens to have a supply of hay bales through her business www.ridonkulousacres.com (shameless plug), where she raises miniature donkeys on their farm. Danna is allowing us to “borrow” the hay for our booth, as long as we return it back to her donkeys afterwards. The TACKarchitects team spent most of last Wednesday transporting hay bales from Bob and Danna’s ranch near Fort Calhoun.

Lessons learned so far: Hay bales suck. 

 Team Members:  

Jeff Dolezal, AIA LEED AP (TACKarchitects)

Rebecca Harding, AIA LEED AP (TACKarchitects)

Chris Houston, AIA LEED AP (TACKarchitects)

Ryan Henrickson, (TACKarchitects)

Clayton Chapman, (Grey Plume)