CONTEXT

Located north of Yellowstone Park, Tippet Rise Art Center ­with an extension of 10,260 acres of grazing land­ is born as a destination where “art, music, land, sky, and poetry can weave together into an algorithm which is greater than the sum of its parts”, where the visitor experiences nature through art (or maybe art through nature), where local fauna and ranching activity can coexist with artistic and architectural interventions. Tippet Rise celebrates the concept that art, music, architecture, and nature are inextricably linked in the human experience, each making the others more powerful. Transforming matter into habitable space, Structures of Landscape give shelter to the center’s outdoor activities across its vast territory, unfolding a new constellation of programs among the plateaus, ridges, canyons and hills of sublime beauty that make the site. It is because of wilderness –of weather and life­ at Tippet Rise- that the project is conceived as raw architecture: robust, earthy and rough; while also expressive and acoustically precise. Between October 2015 and April 2016, three of these Structures were built: Beartooth Portal, Inverted Portal and Domo. These architectures, together with a series of art works by Alexander Calder, Mark Di Suvero, Stephen Talasnik and Patrick Doherty, opened Tippet Rise Art Center for the first time in June of 2016. Today, after almost two years in operation, our work continues to accommodate the organic growth of the program, progressively activating dormant stars of the proposed constellation. The project, as nature, is alive.

PERFORMANCE

With its infinite extension of rolling hills against the backdrop of the Beartooth Mountains, Tippet Rise site, resembles a lunar landscape. How to incorporate in such a unique setting an architecture that incarnates its spirit? To start designing we tried to set aside our urban thinking, to prevent ubiquitous urbanization and develop new tools, methods and languages that would help us create following the rules of the land, reading constellations instead of grids and molding land instead of consuming it. Structures of Landscape insert themselves in nature without conflicting with ongoing processes and lives, maximizing the use of local resources for their construction and responding with their massiveness, richness of textures and essential forms to the challenges and opportunities of the remote site, extreme weather and elevated mission. Widely spread across the vast territory, these architectures use passive energy strategies, require no maintenance and do not suffer when empty. Equal parts shelter, concert space and earthworks, they seek to create memorable experiences for visitors -performers and audience members alike- and ingeniously become instruments themselves, channeling winds, reflecting sound and ultimately projecting it into the landscape: always welcoming interaction. Structures of Landscape build landscapes within landscapes and enable habitation without exploitation. They resonate with the immensity, roughness and solitude of the place amplifying its values, mediating between people and the environment, and situate our actions in an ambiguous position between nature, architecture and art, transcending unimaginative categorizations.