Nick Zukauskas

This proposal reuses an old telecommunications company building along the Lincoln Highway to create a studio, residence and maker space. The land behind the building becomes a courtyard in which performances and other gatherings can take place. This space becomes a physical representation of a pixel glitch. The orthogonal plots contain various textures, plants and surfaces found throughout the area, constrained to and reoriented within this space as a means to “glitch” the site's reading when viewed from above, in mapping programs such as Google Maps. This is a reaction to the inherent fuzziness of this part of the country, a place in which the reading of where the built environment ends and the landscape begins is often hard to establish. A means of merging the anologue site and the digital world. 

This proposal looks at the past, and how archived data can become the basis of a new architecture. This site looks to establish a media lab on the existing footings of a former grain handler, that's existence is relegated to the Google street-view archives. By recreating this massing, a new structure can rise to accommodate an internet based artist. The residence features a display on the back side, giving the artist an outlet to communicate with both the Union Pacific railroad adjacent, as well as highway travelers. 

The structure that was utilized in this proposal housed an agricultural implement shop in the past, but now sits vacant, its once prime location along the Lincoln highway going unused. By housing the artist and their studio in this vacant structure, the land adjacent can be given over to a public pavilion in which a sense of community can be reestablished. 

The pavilions’ design comes from a sampling and aggregation of the rooftops of Sunol, in an attempt to reinforce an idea of identity and community in the town of 73. This sampling generates a place that is literally connected, while bringing together the existing landscape and built environment into a new architectural form. 

This site looks to take advantage of the existing, historically designated Lodgepole Opera House building as the center of an artist residence and gallery dedicated to projected art. The site proposal includes a residence, outdoor Screening Park and a gallery and studio inside the former Lodgepole Opera House. 

The screening park was created by a series of digital manipulations of the existing ground condition. First, a google Earth photo of the site was used, then passed through a series of filters to create regions that could be extruded into forms. These forms provide seating for film viewing, while creating a sense of place and integration with the landscape. The residence, a small two story structure at the south end of the site is utilized as a projection screen for the park, and becomes a “stage” on the opposite side, with a series of metal poles obscuring and fragmenting the views in and out. 

Together, this proposal looks to reestablish a “main street” that allows for future development around it, and a place for community gathering. 

“New media” a term coined as a way to categorize art dealing with digital technologies, robotics, interactivity and performance. While new media art has been around since the late 1800’s, it came to prominence in the 60’s with the likes of Nam Jun Paik and A. Michael Noll. As digital technologies have slowly taken over more of our lives, the boundaries and variety of Media works has increased drastically. The storage and archiving of these works creates a new set of rules and guidelines that are vastly different than normal curatorial practices.

The Museum site in Sidney becomes a hub in which many programmatic elements can rotate around. The site comes with several embedded factors that contribute to the form and function of the museum itself. Historically, Hickory Street was known as Front Street, as it faces the railroad lines. This street was home to over 80 saloons in the late 1800’s and became the center of the city, known infamously as “Sinful Sidney”  This distinction died out as the town settled into the 1900’s and with it, the once thriving Front street. Today, Hickory Street is more of an ally space than a road, with none of the former businesses in existence, and a distinct lack of street activity. The City of Sidney recently expressed interest in the intersection of 10th and Hickory becoming the home to a community space, where farmers markets and other events could take place.  

Programmatically, the museum allows for a 24 hour computing lounge, providing internet access to the community, the Media Lab, which would be responsible for the storage, replication, emulation and archiving of all media art data, a park and pavilion that provides both an amphitheater for projection of films, as well as a covered space for farmers markets and other community events, and a tower for observation and connection back to the highway

The museum itself provides a space that is universally adaptable to accommodate the vast variety of media types. A series of columns can be deployed across the gallery to create spaces for different shows. These columns allow for curving as well as rectilinear configurations, and provide the ability of the artist to completely control the viewing environment. 

The design language comes from a variety of observational and site specific factors, culminating in a project that unifies many distinct forms into a composition of spaces. The museum itself takes its form from the pressures of the site, wrestling with the former front of the city in Hickory Street, and the current Main street a half block to the south. The patterning of the façade becomes a homage and play to the typical brick construction of the town, by digitizing the rhythm of brick into a pattern that reads differently at different distances. The daylight and structural systems unite on the roof to provide an abstracted mapping of a site. A red X marks the point on the map, surrounded by skylights patterned after a sampled image of crop circles from the area. 

Adjacent, the pavilion makes similar moves, but on an actual landscape. The form recalls the sloping hills beyond the city, pierced by vertical circulation forms that again form figures on the landscape. Finally, a tower rises from between the two, providing views across and back toward the highway, visually connecting the through traffic to the site, as well as providing a canvas for artistic interventions and projections. 

Display of digital art can exist outside of the museum walls, and taking advantage of that, a series of media benches can be placed throughout Sidney. This allows the artworks display to continue, even if another event or community gathering is using the museum space.