Water Resource Experiment Station
View/ Open
Abstract
Students in this studio were asked to design a Water Resource Experiment Station at a site on the bank of the Missouri River west of Linton and South of Bismarck, North Dakota. The students were given presentations by studio collaborators from the Biology Department and the Department of Civil Engineering concerning the use of constructed wetlands to clean waste water from the laboratory and rain water harvesting from the building’s exterior to add fresh water to the clean waste water for the use of the laboratory. Each design is approximately 20,000 square feet in area, has public parking and public toilets accessible from the exterior and is intended to be open to the public for their use after hours and on the weekends.
The design of this project was driven by the idea of water conforming to the form of land. The preliminary study resulted in a parti that represented a series of squares, where the designed developed from. My main intention was to present the experience I had at the site to the visitors of this building through architecture, most importantly, the views of the site. Because the site was very broad and open, I wanted the architecture to not dominate the site, but grow out of the site instead.