Hejduk's Architecture of Characters

Narrative #1-Rex

Mobridge works as...

...a bridging (threshold or liminal) community where Sitting Bull and the Native American culture of the Lakota Sioux were met by "Hiawatha", the name of the luxurious passenger line (named after the heroine of a Longfellow poem) that at first terminated the Milwaukee Road at Wrigley Square but eventually became the mid-point of a grand rail line that ran from Chicago across the continent through Yellowstone and on to Tacoma.  Presidents who traveled by transcontinental rail preferred the comfort of the rail cars built in Milwaukee and maintained in Mobridge on the Hiawatha.  We have references to Taft, Coolidge, and Truman stopping and speaking in Mobridge.  We have references that this has long been a traditional crossing point in the Missouri.  US12 is called Grand Crossing Highway.  It iwas also a major junction on the Yellowstone Trail.  Mobridge's geographical location is important in culture and history.  Time based conditions.  Activity Things.  Durations.  Vectors into Surfaces

...a connected (holistic or placed) community of 3,500 diverse citizens living engaged with their environment at the bridged, engineered, well-fished, and wonderfully recreative waterscape of Lake Oahe and the Upper Missouri River Basin slices through vast prairies of farming enterprises and ranch land shared by wild fauna that thrive on the open rollingspace of grassland plains.  Mobridge's connection to the natural and agricultural landscape is important in recreation, ecology, and economy. Object based conditions.  Materiality Things.   Extensions.  Surfaces into Vectors.

..............

This begins to serve a narrative for the project.  Can built form embody any of these narrative conditions?  To what extent?  Can it advocate for something?  Can it provide a platform for things to be done and things to stand?  Is that important in a community?

Charge:

Above everything else we have to do in the project:  How do we make the place work as something rather than just symbolize and image other places and times?

We want to make it work like something rather than look like something.

The project can't look like a bridge. It needs to bridge.

The project can't look like a connection.  It needs to connect.

How do the users we've been developing change with the new findings of the last visit to Mobridge?  Who are now the cast of characters to consider as "users" or "inhabitants" of the place in the narrative?  Are the inhabitants, occupants, the users, the tourists, the visitors, the revelers, the workers the embodied sens elf character in your project?

Write out a cast of characters.  

Describe them in detail.  Edit, iterate, try the next step, retreat to this point.  Mull.

Describe the program.  Map their relations in detail or diagram.

Starting from a reading of the narrative above write out your own narrative of the project and Mobridge.

What are the characters of your project.

One thing we know now...The project is called, "The End of the Line".

The Square Speaks...

The owners of some local businesses that are in the block north of the square feel strongly that the new curbs and whatever it is that ends up inside the curbs will be a detriment to their businesses.  They decided not to engage us directly in these discussions.  We should try to find a way to make the dialog across the community direct rather than mediated.  A specific point of concern expressed in this disengaged population is that the new public work will limit service access to their businesses in a significant way.

As we've discussed in class, the location isn't even really platted in the city as a "place".  Across history its been a non-site, an empty white spot on maps and an expanse of asphalt in space.  It is undefined--neither the space of a street or the space between streets that Georges Perec speaks about in the chapter "Streets" in his book SPECIES OF SPACE:

The buildings stand one beside the other. They form a straight line. They are expected to form a line, and it's a serious defect in them when they don't do so. They are then said to be 'subject to alignment', meaning that they can by rights be demolished, so as to be rebuilt in a straight line with the others.  The parallel alignment of two series of buildings defines what is known as a street. The street is a space bordered, generally on its two longest sides, by houses; the street is what separates houses from each other, and also what enables us to get from one house to another, by going either along or across the street.
...........
Contrary to the buildings, which almost always belong to someone, the streets in principle belong to no one. They are divided up, fairly equitably, into a zone reserved for motor vehicles, known as the roadway, and two zones, narrower obviously, reserved for pedestrians, which are called pavements. A certain number of streets are reserved exclusively for pedestrians, either permanently, or else on particular occasions. The zones of contact between the roadway and the pavements enable motorists who don't wish to
go on driving to park.
...........
The junction of the roadway and the pavements is known as the gutter. This area has a very slight incline, thanks to which rainwater can flow off into the drainage system underneath the street, instead of spreading right across the roadway, which would be a considerable impediment to the traffic.

In our initial analyses we noted that this location doesn't fit into the traditional sense of street and building relationships and its a condition we generally perceived but really only now politically realize that we should have more closely engaged the business owners and residents whose properties abut the site about what we will  propose to mark this historical spot in history and to celebrate today's Mobridge.  

Though we watched this importance of the location in action from the roof of the Burns Brothers Building (1909), we didn't ma it out into the list of common and cyclical uses of the site--the everyday life (construction materials and trades) of the vast open asphalt.  To have noticed this use and to have addressed it from the start would have been more professional, more considerate, and would have understood better what this location means to these businesses.  

There's a thin layer of industrial function at the former end of Main Street in Mobridge because it was once primarily an industrial zone--the privately held properties closest to the rail yards of the Milwaukee Road, though the land that is now the south edge of the lumber yard was as recently as the 1950s housing like the house on the NE corner of 1st Ave and 1st Street East house next to city hall.  

We don't think that the "End of the Line" project is any less valid.  It would be good for us to find out specific issues that the changes hobble in business practices.  Problems in a project like this are like the sand that an agitated oyster turns into a Pearl.  They're where we find the crux of a project.  The use was overlooked in our discussions and we just now can see that we haven't appeared as democratic and civically minded as we could have been in this moment of project introduction.  Saying these property owners should have been at the city council meetings is correct in a legal sense or as a calibration of their civic role in the community but there's clearly a voice here that feels left out of the decision making process.  How do we move and amend and adjust to this?

We were in town this Friday to incorporate community ideas into our thinking and to get more people to see and understand the "site".  We talked to anyone who would give us time.  Anyone in town could have said, "Hey, I'd like to talk to you people from SDSU about this project you are working on."  Its a school project.  Explaining how it will affect business, at the least, could be an indelible lesson about economics, politics, property rights, and the line between public space and the value of private enterprise.  We hope people will consider the door to this discussion still open.  Needs of all sorts can be accommodated.  The curb isn't too steep or very fragile to cross but it is a curb.  That much is done.  Nothing else is there yet.  

How, at this juncture, do we sensibly engage these citizens and find a way to work with them?  That would be the professional, public, and civic thing to do.

No Vote from Rick's

Someone from Mobridge called to give you a heads up – The local businessman from Rick's Café has a sign in his window - 

 5 – NO   2- YES 

They do not want you to be blind sided and do not want the students to be discouraged. 

Project Images Shown to CIty Council at August 18 Meeting

First Photos of the Site with the New Curb

courtesy of Dennis Wheeler

Email to Everyone I have an Email Address for in Mobridge

Mobridge Friends:

Assistant Professor Chuck MacBride's Mobridge Waterfront Plan has won a Merit Award from the South Dakota American Institute of Architects.  

Regardless of the particulars of the scheme (especially relative to the pool), a panel of nationally recognized architects from outside South Dakota reviewed a range of projects and determined this scheme as meritorious work in terms of its plausibility, its representational clarify, and the relevant sense of impact it would make on a community.

We're very appreciative of the people of Mobridge for allowing us to use your town as a design subject in these projects that build on the work started by the University of Utah.  We're carrying on that effort in the Wrigley Square Project this year.  The students who have worked on Mobridge now for three years have started calling this part of the town below the tracks…LoMo (Lower Mobridge).  There's a lot to learn from your town and you've made it easy for us to do so. 

A State AIA Design Award is a great professional honor for Chuck.  The project will be published in the national American Institute of Architects Journal.   This puts Mobridge in good positive national scale news again.  The Waterfront project team was Chuck MacBride with students Emily Heezan (second year) from Pierre and Miranda Christensen (third year) from Lake Benton, MN and Jacob Urban (fourth year) from Rapid City.  Tom Uniterseher provided funding support for the construction of the wonderful model by Emily and Miranda.

When the time is right, Chuck would like to show you all issues and ideas in that model about parcelizing LoMo.  There's a whole lot more in the scheme than a pool.  His scheme is composed of recommendations, suggestions, and discussion starters.  Sooner than you think, the way you divide up that land is going to shape a core part of your city.  In this award the State AIA recognizes that he's offering Mobridge professionally strong advice about those decisions.

Yours,


BRIAN  T.  REX Associate Professor & Head
Department of Architecture
South Dakota State University 

www.sdstate.edu/arch   

(605) 688 4841