Swaner Nature Preserve
Park City, Utah
The Nature Preserve, though located in Park City, is surrounded by suburban development and thus provides an oasis of subtle grassland and habitat for mostly small animals, birds and fish. The Preserve functions to cleanse the storm runoff and breathe for the built environment. We had noticed that in a more rural location, the agricultural hay sheds eclipse the landscape, as though something were edited from it in a very abstract and singular way. We used this method of addition through subtraction by employing an elevated plane of blackened copper not only to focus one’s attention internally to the material itself, but to also obscure the horizon line and focus attention to the immediate path and peripheral views. Is consciousness heightened when the visual is diminished? The building is to the Preserve as the Preserve is to its suburban context.
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