Duncan Residence
Lincoln, Nebraska
BVH, in association with Porphyrios Associates, was commissioned to design this project in the great midland plains of Nebraska. It is both a house and a gallery for a client who loves hand-woven baskets and who collects modernist abstract sculpture. The artificial wooded mound that serves as its backdrop appears as a surreal intrusion in the flatness of the prairie and an unlikely neighbor to the adjacent interstate that it helps mask. A grid of paths is superimposed on the wooded grounds of the estate with its resultant squares planted in different varieties of prairie grass. Amidst this colorful patchwork quilt, where the paths intersect or at the end of their axes, the gigantic sculptures are sited.
The massing of the building is additive with the principal exhibition and entertaining rooms clustered around a central atrium. A colonnaded courtyard at the north end serves as a carport and service yard. The house has the scale of a gallery and just as the picturesque quality of the estate contrasts with the prairie grid, the Indiana stone of its walls contrasts with the brushed stainless steel windows and doors. This gallery-as-house is pure equivocation, occupying as it does the space between public and private. As a gallery it offers refuge from an increasing techno-functional world. At the same time, it claims the traditional protective functions of a house associating with the ground and becoming ‘natural’ to its prairie site.
BVH, in association with Porphyrios Associates, was commissioned to design this project in the great midland plains of Nebraska. It is both a house and a gallery for a client who loves hand-woven baskets and who collects modernist abstract sculpture. The artificial wooded mound that serves as its backdrop appears as a surreal intrusion in the flatness of the prairie and an unlikely neighbor to the adjacent interstate that it helps mask. A grid of paths is superimposed on the wooded grounds of the estate with its resultant squares planted in different varieties of prairie grass. Amidst this colorful patchwork quilt, where the paths intersect or at the end of their axes, the gigantic sculptures are sited.
The massing of the building is additive with the principal exhibition and entertaining rooms clustered around a central atrium. A colonnaded courtyard at the north end serves as a carport and service yard. The house has the scale of a gallery and just as the picturesque quality of the estate contrasts with the prairie grid, the Indiana stone of its walls contrasts with the brushed stainless steel windows and doors. This gallery-as-house is pure equivocation, occupying as it does the space between public and private. As a gallery it offers refuge from an increasing techno-functional world. At the same time, it claims the traditional protective functions of a house associating with the ground and becoming ‘natural’ to its prairie site.
