With the silos positioned prominently in the middle of Omaha along Interstate 80, a major artery that moves from the east coast to the west with 450 miles through the state of Nebraska, Brian Kelly, an Omaha architect and educator approached his submission as a prime opportunity for initiating dialogue about the issues affecting the population both locally and globally.  Rather than attempting to resolve an architectural design problem, he is interested in encouraging an exchange of ideas about the possible reuse of agricultural and industrial relics such as these, and the catalytic change that urban infill can generate.  His idea seeks to simultaneously celebrate the silo’s history and suggest a rejuvenation of the edifice that points to a synergetic contemporary culture and its lifestyles.

As an architect, educator, and amateur photographer, Brian has a deep fascination with the power of the image and the ability of Montage Theory to create, as Sergei Eisnstein called it, “tertium quid” or third thing.  This theory suggests that the assemblage of various, unrelated sequences in a film may be combined to produce a situation where the sum is greater than its parts.  In concre(A)te synergies, a series of images of unrelated building components were assembled to create a visual alluding to something outside itself.

In the interest of legibility, readily recognizable symbolic forms are used to communicate the new livable function. Additive elements such as stairs, planters, and shutters are juxtaposed against the subtractive elements of window voids that penetrate the massive cylindrical volume contained within. This legibility is assisted by conveying scale through repetitive (and easily recognizable) elements that suggest floor levels and internal spatial arrangements.

A technique of photo montage was used to create clarity and association with the proposal.  For the sake of cohesion, static building elements, which are the vehicles for the activity of life, such as the stairs, were left grey tone.  Components of the graphic depicting life, such as the people, planters, and the interior face of the shutters, were intentionally saturated with color.  Existing grain movement equipment, re-purposed as parasitic planters, are precariously positioned along the silo. These planters suggest that they are only there for a short time, and that tomorrow they may possibly be above, below, or on an adjacent silo.  Together, these elements and techniques suggest the potential synergy that can be created through the unique association between existing context and a new injected use.

Brian M. Kelly, RA is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln College of Architecture.  His previous teaching experience includes Drury University’s Hammons School of Architecture in Springfield, MO and California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo.  Prior to joining the faculty at UNL, Brian served as lead designer in the office of Randy Brown Architects, designing several award-winning projects of various types and scales.  In addition to teaching, he and his wife, Andrea, have recently started their own practice, ATOMdesign, focusing on smaller scale architectural projects, objects, and graphics.

Brian’s teaching focus is in the areas of beginning design, architectural representation theory, and the craft of making.  His student work has been featured in academic journals and his design work has been published nationally and internationally.

Omaha artist Mary Day scanned an ear of corn for what she calls a ‘cliche’;  to be in Nebraska is to be surrounded by corn, literally and figuratively.  And the image of the corn cob is a most obvious recall of the identity and function of the grain elevator as a structure that originally stored the grain. But Mary’s scan lead her to a submission that is anything but cliche, and rather a re-composition of an iconic symbol of  farmland in Nebraska and the Midwest, based on an implicitly recurring unit of measure. A corn kernel to a corn row to a corn cob to the rows of corn to the fields of corn is an exponentially increasing unit of measure. Mary used her scanned ear of corn as the structural equivalent of “mathematical” divisions in the picture plane, similar to those that strike her each time she flies over the Omaha landscape. The conceptualization of the rows of kernels parallel the larger concept of rows of corn in the field to fields of corn in the landscape, and so on. Breaking the corn cob into informational lines which converge back to an image of corn parallels the artistic process of contextualizing images into information. The handmade mark is important to the concept because it is a visceral response to visually perceived information. Drawing is about the connection of head to heart to hand. The finished drawing on the silo shows the gestural mark held within the structural division of the corn cob. The drawing of the corn cob into informational bits is an equivalent for patterns perceived from an airplane, or Google earth, or NASA satellite photos. These views are all information, just as the hand drawn line is information.
As the rural/urban landscape continues to shift, the silos are providing new opportunities for social engagement, informational display, and historical clarification, as succinctly embodied in Mary’s artistic reinterpretation of otherwise banal systems and objects. Mary Day is a multi-media artist living and working in Omaha, Nebraska. She received her BA in Art History and Photography and an MFA in Painting from Florida State University. She currently has a solo exhibit at the Kimmel Nelson Harding Center for the Arts in Nebraska City. She is a recipient of a 2010 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council. Recent exhibitions include a solo show in 2010 at the Fred Simon Gallery and inclusion in the 2009 Jackson Artworks Mark Makers Invitational. Her work is included in several public and private collections including the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery (Lincoln, NE), Pillsbury Company (St. Paul, MN) and Metropolitan Community College in Omaha.

‘Aerial Production’, by DeOld Andersen Architecture, a partnership between Nebraska natives Emily Andersen and Geoff DeOld, depicts the transformation of the Midwest landscape at the city edge from farmstead to suburban and exurban development. Focusing on a swath of land at the edge of Omaha two miles long by a half mile wide, three different stages of land use are captured simultaneously; productive farmland, former farmland in the process of being re-formed into suburban tract development, and a completed and occupied residential development. This abstracted representation of a literal condition unifies the fits and starts by which land development occurs through a lens of production – land that once produced agricultural crops now produces homes and the infrastructures that support them.

The graphic will be viewed against the backdrop of the grain elevator, an infrastructural armature that once supported agricultural land-use, and the neighboring interstate infrastructure that facilitates the ongoing development and access to the newer forms of settlement and everything in between. Viewers of the abstracted graphic have the opportunity to compare the relationship between these different and continually changing land types predominant in the Midwest landscape.

DeOld Andersen, an architecture and design practice based in Brooklyn, NY, grew out of ongoing interest and exploration of topics related to urban and suburban development, such as the impact of big-box architecture on contemporary public space, and the programmatic possibilities of the suburban retail strip. The firm is currently engaged in a range of projects including programming and site selection for a notable international company in New York, interiors and graphic work, a sustainable residence in Nebraska, and continued research projects focused on topics of suburban development and urban infrastructure. Prior to locating to New York in 2001, where Emily was an Associate at Slade Architecture, and Geoff was an Associate Principal with STUDIOS architecture, they both received their Master of Architecture degrees at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

More work from DeOld Andersen can be seen here:  www.d-aarch.com