Project in Detail

Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion

“One must make an optic, one must see nature as no one has seen it before.”

Paul Cezanne

The 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art + Nature Park is the result of a studied relationship between building, land and art with an infinite point of view. Our is to craft a logic of ideas and physical works that may open the repressed raw power of environment, art, and architecture through a re-thinking and re-making of where we already are. Here, the questions posed are born from within the found condition – an immanent response, imbued with convincing meaning and significance for the Museum of Art, its patrons and the citizens of Indianapolis. We search for a place of shared resolve where nature and artifice are sensually perceived as one and many; the detail and horizon.

How can form reveal what is going on here? The Art and Nature Park will be directed towards making a place where one becomes conscious of the residual forms that reveal the creative life force at work in our world. Taking our cue from this land’s dynamic nature, we will exploit the boundary between agent and medium and make felt the perceptual space between the two so that each is seen more clearly. We propose a place where material specifics reveal infinite phenomena. The park as an emergent structure will be a laboratory for the making of site-specific phenomena based artworks – ephemeral, temporal, and transient.

The 100 acre park site is born of wildly turbulent, nature/culture phenomena constantly changing the land’s structure. Tinkering with it as cultivated urban wilds proves a sound means of joining Nature and City as a recovered, unpredictably changing but cultivated landscape. Prone to flooding by the White River at its edges and a 30 acre lake in the middle the park offers only .67 acres for the construction of the Ruth Lily Visitors Pavilion.

Once visitors have accessed the grounds and experienced the park/Art interface, they might wish to attain a more precise understanding of the natural conditions represented in the Art and Park. The Visitor’s Center then must provide educational space and a respite for dissemination of such information. This portion of the building program should provides a gathering area, exhibit space, classroom space, and media capabilities. Occupying these spaces will allow hands-on learning. This programmatic element is the Ruth Lily Visitors Pavilion.

The Visitors Pavilion provides a place of reflection and assessment, a place of questioning what has been directly experienced by the visitor and of what was observed, or not, of the processes – natural and cultural - at work within the Art + Nature Park. It too may serve as a threshold for those entering the park from the Indianapolis greenway system. Educational activities for a few or maybe fifty persons help visitors gain a deeper, and perhaps, even more meaningful understanding of the relationships between nature-made and man-made forms. A refuge from in-climate weather, it is also a respite, a place to rejuvenate the mind and body.

Activities of identification and examination take place here. Site exhibitions of various sorts are imagined as a means of documenting the traces of change in the Art and Landscape that emerge over time. The visitors pavilion is both social and educational.

The Visitors Pavilion is light upon the earth, detached with column supports, an overt horizontal frame structure in tension as much as compression. A continuous perforated surface of wood slats forms a semi-transparent envelope supported by a steel exoskeleton. Walls, roof, and floor decking allow natural light and moisture to filter through it. The folded planes of the envelope sandwich glass enclosed program elements. Here, covered exterior space and interior space, nearly equivalent, become interchangeable and multi-functional. Reflections of the trees in the glass cladding act as a camouflage for the building in its setting - a low-slung form, bathed in dappled light, apparently floating among the trees, an apparition in the garden.

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