Visitor's Center

This past week, my studio section finished up our midterm project. For this first half of the semester, we were to focus on wood construction and study other examples of such around the world. In order for there to be 8 final projects, our professor had us split into groups of two. Our assignment was to design a Visitor’s Center for the Oscar-Zero Missile Alert Facility near Cooperstown, North Dakota.

Earlier this semester, our professor took us out to Cooperstown to look at this site and get a tour of this historic location. The Missile Alert Facility dated back to the Cold War era and was constructed in response to the impending Soviet nuclear threat. The US government chose North Dakota based on its central location and its fairly bland countryside, perfect to hide their nuclear missiles. As the alert facility and missile silo were located apart from one another, we visited the silo first. When went there, there wasn’t much there besides a barbed wire fence and the steel cap to the silo.

A view 50 feet underground in the capsules at Oscar-Zero

Next, we visited the Oscar-Zero Missile Alert Facility. After we got a tour of the above ground structure and stepping back into the 70’s, we took the elevator 50 feet underground to the two concrete capsules. Each with walls 3 feet thick, the capsules held the control center for the missile and some other amenities for the minute men that had to be down there for extended periods of time. The floors were suspended using massive hydraulics in order to withstand a nuclear blast. Once we went back up, we had some time to look around the site. For this project we had a few requirements such as a theatre, café, gift shop and exhibit area but the most important thing to keep in mind was the wood construction.

One of the first conceptual sketches by Brennan Tyler

Working with my partner, Brennan Tyler, our first concept was a sketch that Brennan drew that outlined a bridge. This was to contrast the subterranean properties of the capsules as we lifted two separate buildings out of the ground, connecting with the bridge. As our professor was fond of this idea, we kept at it and flushed out the style of structure and the building layout from there. Our first concept was a sad looking pair of mounds covered in grass connected by a glass bridge. We quickly realized that in order to celebrate the wooden structure, as the assignment intended, we would need to organize the building in some way. I came up with the idea to lay down a hexagonal isometric grid and organize the building off of the triangles that the grid formed. From there we had the layout figured out and the form was coming together as well. After a few short weeks, presentation day was just around the corner.

The finished product

As I spent a week building the model, Brennan carried on putting together the presentation board and even created a video to showcase the design. When it came down to it, our professor was very impressed with our work and the guest fifth year critiquers also seemed to like it. Even with our jumbled first concept, I’m glad we were able to put our brains together and create the visitor center we had imagined.

My partner, Brennan Tyler, and I after our presentations