The time has arrived for the FINAL banner blog in the 13-week one-by-one unveiling of each piece of artwork for installation on the grain elevator.  Getting to know the visionary behind each design has become the best part of this project.  Each one provides a unique perspective that we can’t imagine the final installation, as a whole, without. The Chef Blogs will be coming at a rapid pace leading up to the October 3 dinner, and then will dovetail into Farmer Blogs to highlight the folks who grow/raise the food we will enjoy at that epic event.

The last, but certainly not least, banner ‘The Battery’, designed by landscape designer and urban planner, Shaun Smakal was the only submission out of 150 to embrace the crucial global topic of energy.  During Smakal’s background research for his entry, he accidentally discovered that a silo is the exact proportion of a AA battery, and their past use as grain storage certainly represents enormous quantities of energy storage.  Without getting into the complex physics of energy production, consider the transference of sun, water, and nutrients into a new harvestable, and edible form that even now produces fuel for our cars.  Energy indeed.  According to Smakal, landuse, agriculture, and energy are the complex and intricately interwoven pieces of the larger human landscape.  The role that energy plays in the landscape is often ignored or unseen by many Americans, so by utilizing the instantly recognizable form of a battery, he seeks to coalesce this complexity into a 3-tiered format that is iconic and visual enough to be recognizable to someone driving by on the interstate, and also able to develop a broader energy/landuse discussion. The positive and negative terminals represented by a battery are an important component to any discussion about landuse and energy that, according to Smakal, is often missing in our oil focused society.

The image as a whole, represents a battery, and each subsequent spectrum of color a battery itself and a graphic image of sixteen potential energy resources as identified by Scientific American, in order of increasingly irreversible impact on our larger landscape. The graphic images visually highlight the energy resource itself, with an emphasis on how it exists in the landscape or its raw form,  and the colors reference both a natural rainbow and the Dept. of Homeland Security’s National Terror Alert System:

Shaun Smakal, a Master of Landscape Architecture candidate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a graduate of the Resource Planning B.Sc. program at the University of Michigan – Flint, specializes in imaging how cities, especially the declining, post-industrial, rust belt cities of Detroit and Flint, would look, function and change through radical landscape and urban development that makes them into environments that regenerate the human, ecological and infrastructure functions that comprise them.

His professional design work began with a role as a memorial designer for a small, family-owned monument design company. During his academic career, he served as a writing tutor on campus, teaching assistance and designed and built sets for student-run plays. He’s also participated in several award winning charrettes including Vancouver’s entry in the CitiesPlus Integrated Design Workshop and the Community Roof Garden & Food Security Charrette for the Collingwood Community Centre, among others.  Shaun has spent the last 3.5 years as a landscape and urban designer and planner in Flint, MI where his work and personal interests, in addition to standard landscape projects, has included presentations on urban agriculture, design and communication materials for urban infrastructure and downtown revitalization in Flint, large-scale infrastructure enhancements for brownfields and highways, and serving as a facilitator for the City of Flint’s Neighborhood Action Sessions and on several event and neighborhood committees.

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

Recent works by Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser and Alice Waters indicate that the rapid expansion of industrial monoculture farming is adversely effecting national health while making it economically prohibitive and politically difficult for smaller farms to survive. As a result, and contrary to this trend, small farms have an increasingly crucial role in providing healthy sources of food through more direct control over cultivation methods that can replenish the land, minimize fertilizer pollution, and provide community support, both socially and economically, by creating local markets and providing local jobs.  As our nation continues to struggle with increasing rates of disease and obesity, along with a continually fluctuating economy, looking to local markets created through the very passion and quest for independence that originally settled our most fertile lands is an option that, with greater support for innovation, can continue to provide the diversity of choices and solutions that has forever underpinned the liberties of the United States.

Adelina Castro and Bill Watson encourage support for smaller scale agriculture with the banner, “Speak Up for Small Farms.”  Conceived as a ‘landscape’ of political activism, their banner is a quilt of 539 colored hexagons with each swatch indicating a Senate or Congressional district and enjoining them with the printed statement, “Speak Up for Small Farms.”  When installed, the banner will represent a role call of those who have the power to change the way we legislate and regulate farming in the United States.  After exhibition at four locations in Nebraska, the banner will be harvested by a regional group of farmers, and each hexagon will be detached and mailed to the designated US Senator, Member of The House of Representatives, and host cities Mayor.

The Stored Potential jury appreciated this submission not only for its simple and beautiful repetitive land-like patchwork design, but also for an engagement of activism that lives far beyond its temporary life as a new facade on the elevators.  Despite recent national tragedies that seem far outside the average citizens influence, this submission is a reminder that our voices still have a place in a democratic society.  And this project makes such a voice heard thanks to the imagination and action of Castro Watson.

Adelina Castro, born in Mexico City, and Bill Watson, born in Denver, met while attending architecture school at the University of Texas at Austin.  After graduation and a short time working in Madrid, they settled in New York City where they have worked for internationally recognized architecture firms including Smith-Miller + Hawkinson, NBBJ and Gluckman Mayner Architects. In 2006, Adelina and Bill established Castro Watson to pursue an interdisciplinary approach to big picture problem solving.  The office has realized a wide range of projects from speculative research to architectural, furniture and product design.  Current work focuses on retro-fit infrastructures that modify dense urban housing to provide roof top agriculture.,  Adelina and Bill enthusiastically participate in their local CSA and volunteer at Creative Time, a public arts presenter, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  When not in the office, they can be found exploring the environs outside New York City with Greta, their German Short Haired Pointer.

To accomplish magic is to remove and remind.  The fundamental conceit of illusion rests on removing what has always been in the viewers’ eye and then to remind them, at the moment of spectacle, that the same elements yet remain.  Castro Watson seeks to similarly accomplish a mental illusion in physical reality—new designs that captivate and innovate while simultaneously convincing the viewer of what seems always to have been there.  Perhaps their response to this call for submissions will remind the 76,000 viewers who pass the silos each day in their car, that the small business owner holds more possibility than ever.  To see more work by this dynamic duo, visit www.castrowatson.com

Influenced by the structural elements of grain elevator architecture, Omaha graphic designer Cathy Solarana chose the subordinate drive shed as her focus of exploration.  Drive sheds had their own structural and functional personalities despite being dwarfed by the huge multi-barreled contiguous white concrete cylinders they served. They were as unique and interesting as the elevators themselves, and as the result of Solarana’s research indicates, are quintessential to the representation of the Prairie Skyscrapers.  Although humble wood structures, the drive shed function was important: to protect farmers from the weather while unloading their grain.  A highly simple structure resembling a wooden lean-to, the drive shed is nonetheless an important part of the uniquely North American ‘architecture of grain’, designed for function and simplicity without unnecessary decoration.

Italian architect Aldo Rossi commented about the American grain elevator:

The Great Plains of America are vast … its villages turned inward as if time had stood still. These people [weren't] seeking America, but escaping Europe, and in [their] first wooden silos [was the] memory of [European] architecture. Over time the silos rose with ever greater assurance and created the landscape of the New World. In abandoning the problem of form they rediscovered architecture.

These new forms began to rise up along the railways of the Midwest — first in flammable wood, then tile, steel, and concrete – locating towns just as cathedrals located the towns of Europe. By the 19th-century Midwestern farming communities forgot their European cathedrals and created a new architecture of pure functional storage.  Just after World War I, Europe realized that America had created a whole new architecture with no precursor. Modernist architect Le Corbusier, who held disdain for the pillars and arches of the old European architectural orders as inhumane to the people who used them, revered the functional simplicity of grain elevators serving people and their purposes. These  prototypes of functional 20th-century architecture are wonders of the world – clean, anonymous, geometric and simple.

Cathy Solarana believes good design comes from inside the project — one must understand the depth of something before it can be communicated to the world. This is why she begins each project with thoughtful research into what the brand stands for now, and what its hopes to communicate in the future.

Cathy’s resume tells a thoughtful soul search of her own; founding her own small design firm, Visually Speaking, teaching design for nine years at her alma mater, Creighton University, and big agency life with six years at Bailey Lauerman where she created award-winning work for brands like Union Pacific, The Nature Conservancy, Omaha Community Foundation and AIGA Nebraska Chapter. Through this personal life research, Cathy learned that she loves working with people who are striving for something, she loves small businesses, startups, nonprofits … people with big ideas and bigger plans. Cathy likes to get in at the beginning, and be part of making it come true. That kind of work is more than just rewarding to Cathy. It’s inspiring.

Through Cathy’s exploration into grain elevator structure, she created an iconic design style of a simple line and shape. Together with graphic bold colors the drive shed becomes the focal point, rather than a supplemental structure. The use of scale pays homage to its purpose. The giant wheat stalk stands as a representation of all the grains that have filled the silos and fed families, not just in consumables, but as an employer, customer, investor, and a vital commercial hub, for generations. The striped curve pattern in the background is an abstraction inspired by a hand forged silo in rural Nebraska from the 1930′s.

According to author Barbara Krupp Selyem in her photo essay ‘The Legacy of Country Grain Elevators’:

With the increasing demise of drive sheds whose construction was not that of the concrete silo………It is now left to the painter, photographer, historian, and poet to capture the essence of the country elevator.  They are the ones who will weave the threads of function, architecture, and social significance into artfulness that will be used by future generations to evaluate and appreciate its legacy.

More of Cathy’s work can be seen at www.cathysolarana.com