A loaded name to be sure, American? Beauty? These are words with powerful images, emotions, and histories. So that becomes the strategy, investigate the words, break down the name into its components and search for their meaning.

american
The word speaks, ideally, of freedom, an egalitarian culture, where knowledge, wealth, and self determination are within the grasp of every citizen. The vast production power of our economic system. There is also a cynicism, maybe it's realism, in which the word speaks of those who are still unable to achieve knowledge, wealth, and self determination, those who are locked out of the economic system. A view which questions the actual value of that production in this age of McDonald’s, the age of the consumer, in which the basic value of a citizen is their ability to buy, not their humanity. A balance must be achieved between the ideal and the real, not denying either idea, to create an institution which engages the entire spectrum of America.

academy
The academy speaks of the role of this institution. The idea comes from Plato’s school of philosophy at Akademia; held in a sacred grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena, it was a place of discussion, learning and innovation within the field of philosophy. The modern term has been distorted to include college preparatory schools, military schools, and even those who hand out the Oscars. But at its core, an academy is a place for the creation, and preservation of knowledge in a specific field.

beauty
The discussion of beauty has an extensive history going back to the roots of civilization. I skipped ahead, to Kant. In his critiques, Kant attempts to break down the aesthetic experience which we call beauty into different types, the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime, and the good. These span the range from subjective to objective, the completely personal to the utterly universal. The key to what we talk about today when we discuss beauty lies in the realm of the beautiful and the sublime. The attempt is to uncover that aspect[s] of beauty which speaks universally to everyone, without simply being a judgment of good or bad.

In these three words, the context, the task, and the focus are all established. How are they accomplished? There has to be one more layer.

institution
This is what the thing ultimately is. And as an institution within a community, both local and national, it has responsibilities. Louis Kahn’s institution of man outlines the principles of such an institution as providing a place to meet, to learn, and to provide for well-being.

It is through the overlap of this name and Kahn’s principles of the institution which create the program itself, based on five points.

to meet
When people come together, thy enrich each other’s experience. It is almost impossible to avoid the exchange of ideas, and a broadening of horizons. Our digital age provides many new, and previously unconsidered means of meeting others, but these largely rely on shared interests. Perhaps the most interesting and powerful meetings are those between people with different interests, lives, and backgrounds. These accidental meetings are the ultimate goal; to create a place which brings people into direct contact with those they would not otherwise meet.

to learn
Learning is the ultimate goal of life, any activity that does not teach us, should fall away. Curiosity is the quintessential human state, we seek knowledge everywhere, consciously and unconsciously. We yearn to uncover patterns and find connections. The academy must be a place where we are free to indulge this most basic of our needs.

to create
Creation is the natural extension of learning, once we know, we must do. This applies both in the sense of the actual creation of things, and the creation of new knowledge by intense examination of what is already known.

to preserve
To learn, and to create, requires a vast base of knowledge as a starting point. It is through examination and connections within what is already known that new knowledge is gained.

for well-being
In order to pursue higher purposes, the basic elements of our physical existence must be satisfied, thus the academy provides a place for physical relaxation both as a personal search for beauty, and as a preparation for intellectual exercise. This function also serves as an attractor, drawing in the surrounding community and cementing the academy in its social context.

the wasteland
1280 North Third Street. Kansas City, Kansas

Immediately after leaving the highway we drove through the center of a cemetery, the retaining walls on each side holding back not just earth, but those who had found release from this place.

The situation did not improve. Within the next block we marveled at a man in tattered clothes walking down the street with the remains of a paper lunch bag perched on his head. Upon arriving in the civic plaza, it was clear that this was not a joyful place, everyone around seemed to be paying a traffic ticket, or picking up a death certificate.

So we left.

the silo sight [pun]
An immense grain silo looms over the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers. At first glance the structure must be defunct: half of the paint has decided the ground offers more opportunities for it than the building did, and if you stare hard enough you can see the red fingers of rust as they slowly claw their way across every metal surface.

But there is a hissing sound in the air, like sand through an hourglass, and dust rises from the conveyors. This thing is alive.

Behind the silo, across the railroad tracks, there is a stretch of scrubby bushes and sickly trees and an amazing view across the west bottoms to the towers of Kansas City, punctuated by another silo, this one sitting empty, its windows broken and staring darkly out like empty eyes. A slightly sour smell of decades old grain fades in and out of notice.

Not 3 blocks from downtown Kansas City, Kansas, and there is not a soul around. There is a strange urbanity here due to the massive grain silos and proximity to downtown, yet you’re just as isolated here as in the middle of the Konza prairie.

The site itself is dominated by this abandoned grain silo, originally built around 1915, which defines one edge against the activity of the BNSF rails. But the silo is just one remnant of the site’s industrial past: there is a foundation wall braced with a dilapidated wooden frame and pocked with mysterious holes, and a semicircular brick wall, shedding its cracked layer of white paint in an effort to return to its natural state, which was once part of a gasworks.

Between these large-scale features there are countless metal parts, broken pavement, glass fragments, a collapsed trailer who’s now beige carpet holds no clues to its former hue. These all speak of how America became what we now know.

sublime
This wasteland is an amazing place to be, it is the edge of the known and the unknown. This is sublime.

Filling this void with activity could destroy the beauty that is present in this strange place by taking away its own isolation in the face of activity, its strangeness in the middle of normality.

This is America, the detritus of progress.

Something needs to happen here. The program and the site found eachother.

...we just stumbled into the meeting.

silent void
The building and its site are inseparable.

There is beauty everywhere, beauty which we pass by day after day and fail to notice, and a peculiar beauty to be found in those places we least often look. The leftovers of society, the detritus of progress, once alive with critical activity that built our nation, now sits empty, strewn across the Kansas City bottoms now alive only with pigeons and producing nothing.

A silent void at the heart of the city.

This strange tranquility, a peculiar beauty, can be experienced just minutes away from where hundreds of thousands of people live and work, but how many can speak of that feeling? How many have felt it?

This is the American condition, greatness which we take for granted, a past which we abandon, and a widespread ignorance that such an action even occurs.

The American Academy of Beauty is primarily an apparatus to amplify the existing site conditions in order to reveal their peculiar beauty. This beauty arises from the site’s primary characteristics of solitude, scale, tension, and mystery

solitude
The solitude of the site emanates from its abandoned state and physically secluded topographic location. No one uses the site, few enter it, even the adjacent businesses seem barely occupied. The land drops as it approaches the river, pulling the site away, below the view of the crush of activity in downtown and on the highways. This is the precursor to the monastic quality which the academy requires.

scale
A dynamic scale is established by the immense scale of the grain silo; with the silos themselves stretching 80 feet above the ground, and the elevator towering over them at 150 feet every other physical feature of the site is dwarfed, even the 35 foot grade change from the street to the railroad seems insignificant alongside the mass of the silos. This relationship is reinforced by the even larger nearby silo, the hilltop buildings of downtown Kansas City, KS, and the distant towers of Kansas City, MO. These monumentally scaled objects and machines surround the rather vast site, and compress it.

tension
The attributes of solitude and scale are held in a certain kind of tension, a tension that permeates this place. Everything here exists in a kind of in-between ness. The solitude is a solitude in the midst of a crowd, this void in the midst of the city. The scale is, on a human level, of the tiny facing the monumental, the low and the high. The large scale tensions of the landscape are present here, as two rivers converge, their dark waters mixing turbulently within the valley carved by their unending flow to the sea. The valley itself is an in-between space, sitting on the political border between Kansas and Missouri, in place as a gulf between two communities, two Kansas Cities, which are both united and divided simultaneously. The highways, the arteries of this sub-metropolis, this suburban hub, collide and swing overhead.

Within the boundaries of site itself tension is played out spatially, the central space of the site, along its north south axis, sits below street level, compressed on one side by the immense bulk of the silos, and on the other by a berm of earth. This same type of slot-space is found again on the site immediately alongside the silos as you stand between a battered wall and the 150 foot tall tower gazing along the face of the undulating curved silos. Finally, the far side of the site opens to the rail corridor, itself a slot cut through the wasteland between the structures it was built to serve, or were built to serve it.

mystery
Perhaps mystery is best understood as a certain type of tension, a balance point in the present between a vague past, and an unknown future. A kind of blending of potential realized, but unremembered, and potential unrealized and not known.

The mystery of the site lies in its artifacts: the silo, the eerie retaining wall, and the gasworks circle. To uncover the full history of these artifacts would be an interesting but impractical proposition. Yes, records of ownership surely exist, their construction must be known in order to construct around them, and their purposes can be discerned. But it is the everyday which we can’t know; what were the lives of the men who built them, who worked them? What might they have done here? What did they hope to do? To look at these remnants on the site, remnants of simple industrial activity, is like looking into a photograph of someone long dead and creating a life story for them on the scale of the hundreds of men who must have worked here through the years. This is the potential long since realized, and dismissed as unremarkable.

The future is always unknown. The past is hidden below the surface.

Heintzelman
The American Academy of Beauty was awarded honorable mention in the annual Heintzelman forum at Kansas State University. The Heintzelman recognizes "outstanding design achievement in the final semester of the professional architecture degree program." Only one prize is awarded; thus honorable mention is the next highest honor. The announcement can be read here.