WEEPING WILLOW BOTANICAL GARDEN

This project takes place on my family’s farm in Niobrara, Nebraska. Niobrara is a small community with a population of 365 people as of 2020, and it’s the origin of my family’s story in America. My family first settled here during the early 1900’s due to the advent of World War One. Once they came here, they dedicated themselves to farming while sustaining a simple life. This place is one of my first inspirations when it comes to deciding to become an architect, because I saw the houses my grandfathers built and sustained and always dreamed of doing the same for myself. Today the farm is in a state of neglect where all the buildings are abandoned and deteriorating.. To do justice to its mem- ory I proposed the hypothetical botanical garden that facili- tates the aspects of my family’s origin, the Niobrara community, and midwestern agriculture.I did this, I needed to come up with a philosophy for how fractals could be used as a 3D object.

The frame system here has 3 aspects that define the entire space. The first aspect is the base shape of the frame. This provides the structural support where it acts as the beams, girders, and columns throughout the building. The second aspect is the arch. This at first had an aesthetical purpose but later turned into a more functional purpose. The arch, other than adding to the aesthetic, also separated into its own component where it holds vines and any hanging agriculture. These arch components can be seen mostly on the exterior and in sections holding vines. Lastly there is a subset of the arch com - ponent, which is the light fixture component. The light fixture component is a scaled down version of an arch that is split in half where the light sits at the top of the split arch. In this project you can see how the philosophy of design genealogy (where every element stems from one source and is related) is practiced in its absolute form. The main lesson I learned from doing this project was that going forward I should look at an architectural project as a collage of assets that I design based on program requirements. When I do that, everything within the design has a ruleset and logic that I follow, thus making the design more thought out and manufacturable.