DoArch Public Works - Lead, SD

Lead, SD Fall 2017

No. 01

South Dakota State University Department of Architecture

Each year, as part of DoArch’s Public Works initiative, we start our architectural education with fundamental studies of a unique town in South Dakota, using the community as an urban laboratory. We travel to the town and spend time there, meet people, document how the town operates and how it is built, and we hunt for traces of its history. We rigorously search in archives, libraries, and museums for historical documents of the town, centering on railroad and fire insurance maps. Everyone in the class surveys, photographs, records, maps, draws, and models a piece of the town. We build up a sense of how the town has grown and, sometimes, how it has shrunk. We model and catalog the town to capture an essence of the urban fabric, its history, economic relationships, and its operation. We aggregate the work of the class together to build a collective model of the community. We bring our findings to the town and engage the logos, topos, culture, and people as a narrative foundation for what the profession of architecture collectively does—make cities out of buildings, infrastructure, and public space.

In the first eight years of DoArch we’ve made studies of Mobridge, Webster, Millbank, Huron, Brookings, Yankton, and Volga. This year we used Lead, a gold mining town seven hours from our campus, as our subject community.

This document collects and reflects on an academic study of the urbanism of Lead, SD produced by the Fall 2017 students in Arch 101 under the direction of professor Brian T. Rex. The study is part of Public Works, an ongoing project to better understand the urban fabric of the state and grow the collective memory of the Department.

Publisher Department of Architecture (DoArch) South Dakota State University 905 N Campanile Ave. Brookings, SD 57007 www.sdstate.edu/architecture Designed by Mahmoud Sadek Undergraduate Student, Department of Architecture South Dakota State University Model Photographs by Amanda Jamison Graduate Student, Department of Architecture South Dakota State University Typeset in Galaxy Polaris No part of this book may be reprinted without written consent from the author(s).

In the United States, most registration boards require a degree from an accredited professional degree program as a prerequisite for licensure.

The National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), which is the sole agency authorized to accredit professional degree programs in architecture offered by institutions with U.S. regional accreditation, recognizes three types of degrees: the Bachelor of Architecture, the Master of Architecture, and the Doctor of Architecture. A program may be granted an eight-year, three-year, or two-year term of accreditation, depending on the extent of its conformance with established educational standards.

Doctor of Architecture and Master of Architecture degree programs may require a pre-professional undergraduate degree in architecture for admission. However, the pre-professional degree is not, by itself, recognized as an accredited degree.

The Department of Architecture at South Dakota State University offers the following NAAB-accredited degree programs: M. Arch. (Pre-professional degree + 48 graduate credits) M. Arch. (Non-preprofessional degree + 97 credits) Next accreditation visit for all programs: 2019

Lead, SD Fall 2017

No. 01

South Dakota State University Department of Architecture

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The Western town is anything but systematic; never fully realized, resistant to any mapping function that would explain it or underwrite its expansion, the town holds together through a shaky confluence of private arrangements. Unlike the grid (which can resolve itself into an infinite number of possibilities), the western town’s just-barely-cohering streetscape generates a single, eccentric, and tenuous collective, a grouping that is always subject to threats from outside. It is fundamentally optimistic in that it manages to exist at all.

Alex Lehnerer The Western Town: A Theory of Aggregation

Like most other Black Hills communities, Lead, SD began in 1876 as a campsite among placer mining operations and resisted becoming a town until in 1879 when George Hearst of San Francisco, CA coalesced the mining activity into a singular operation, the Homestake Mine, and Lead developed as the company town for one of the richest gold mines in history.

Because there has been so much at stake in its utility, the physical fabric of Lead has undergone some radical urban and economic changes across time. Nowhere in the USA has seen its urban topography so radically altered across its lifespan. Today, the town is sited among the derelict facilities of the Homestake Mine and its grand “Open Cut” dug where a thriving downtown once existed. For a time Lead sported a trolley and interurban rail system and in 1888 it was one of the first cities in the USA to deliver urban electrification. The original downtown fabric of three and four-story structures disappeared into the “Open Cut” in the 1930s, literally undermined by the company’s chase of rich veins below the town’s surface.

In 2002 the economic engine of the Homestake Mine was switched off and the Open Cut was fixed in space and stripped of its utility. The narrative memory of the radical changes to the town is calcifying as the Open Cut sits idle as an 1270 foot deep crater that seems like it was always there and always will be. Years of adjusting and shifting, shrinking, and growing have left conditions in the town’s fabric that deserve study. Geologic time says that entropy and gravity only seem in stasis to the naked eye.

Lead remains a pragmatic foil for Deadwood, its flamboyant fraternal twin three miles downstream. Deadwood was built on individuals vying to make a fortune. It is full of Western lore and sightings of Kevin Costner. Lead was built on a singular corporate goal—tapping into one of the most valuable mineral fortunes on Earth. Deadwood’s mythical value is deeply tied to the place, even spawning a television series.

Lead was a company town and the company controlled its history and extracted its deep wealth until it abandoned the town. The two adjacent towns couldn’t be more different siblings. Virtually all of the viable wealth of the Homestake Mine was extracted out of Lead and South Dakota, eventually launching the successful U.S. Senate campaigns of George Hearst in California and later funding the vast media empire of George’s son, William Randolph Hearst. Today, Deadwood is a tourist destination with daily gambling and gunfights. They can steal your gold but they can’t steal your story. This booklet is a first shot at graphically building a narrative of Lead’s urban fabric.

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Arch 101 Brian Rex Fall 2017 Lead Visit Schedule Friday, September 29

06:00

Gather at AME and head out

432 miles / 6 hr 17min

12:00 - 13:30

Tour the Homestake Visitor Center

13:30

Find your profile line and start a catalog

15:30 - 17:00

Gather at the Homestake Opera House

17:00 - 18:00

First meeting with citizens

18:00 - 19:30

Individual work time

19:30 - 21:00

Dinner

21:00

Head for lodging in Spearfish

Saturday, September 30

08:30 - 09:00

Gather in Spearfish and return to Lead

09:00 - 10:00

Gather to learn laser scanner basics

10:00 - 12:00

Individual work time / scanning sessions

12:00 - 13:00

Lunch

13:00 - 14:30

Second meeting with citizens

14:30 - 17:00

Individual work time / scanning sessions

17:00 - 18:00

Gather to review the day’s observations

18:00 - 21:00

Visit Deadwood over dinner

21:00

Head for lodging in Spearfish

Sunday, October 01

08:30 - 09:00

Gather in Spearfish and return to Lead

09:00 - 10:00

Gather to review submitted photos

10:00 - 12:00

Individual work time / attend a church

12:00 - 12:30

Gather, debrief, pack up

12:30

Leave for Brookings

432 miles / 6 hr 17min

Back in Brookings

20:00

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Italo Calvino

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Catalogue

Our plans to represent Lead started with an analysis of the groundbreaking book art of Ed Ruscha and Hilla and Bernd Becher and their infatuations with cataloging as a means to represent place. Catalogs are lists edited and shaped into a self evident organization of things. Each student was asked to identify a common element in the landscape of Lead. They were asked to take photos of their subject in a consistent and serial format, sharing lighting, composition, and focus to effect a continuity of image across multiple photographs. These sets, taken in situ, were edited and organized iteratively until they resonated as a catalog—each student’s unto itself and collectively as a catalog collection.

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Manhole Covers

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Fire Hydrants

20

Curbs

22

Cracks

24

Arrows

26

Storm Drains

28

Street Lamps

30

Benches

|

Painted Signs

32

Corners

34

Stairs

36

Stairs

38

Mailbox

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House Numbers

40

Looking Down The Fence

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Fences

42

Awnings

| Windows

44

Porches

46

Doors

|

Door Hardware

What we are witnessing is a shift in the traditional relationship between reality and representation. We no longer progress from model to reality, but from model to model while acknowledging that both models are, in fact, real...rather than seeing model and reality as polarized modes, they now function on the same level.

Olafur Eliasson Models are Real

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Modeling Lead

Following a tradition of building large urban models at a scale of 1 inch = 20 feet lead to a new modeling format. The topography in Lead changes over 1000 feet vertically. Where our previous models focused on the logos of the rectangular railroad town grid so common on the Plains, the Lead model unfolded as a totally topos driven project. The meter of the work shifted from the grid to the grade. 1800’ foot long linear passages were struck across the landscape of Lead and were traveled. Each of the passages traverse the rising, dodging spine of the modern main street.

The specifics of urban grade and the materiality of the structures found along these lines were noted, recorded, and represented. On return to Brookings, each of the 31 representations of these passages were scaled, mapped, and inscribed onto the long edge of an eight by four foot sheet of lumber, one for each student visiting Lead.

Not only is the town built on extreme topography, that topography has dramatically changed over the last 125 years. Where the Open Cut is now was a very different downtown core of the community in its prime.

As structures started to succumb to the effects of literal undermining, the original downtown was erased in 1932 when the remaining retail and service businesses in the district were bought up by the Homestake Mining Company and the dense multistory masonry structures filling a three by two (six block) city grid vanished along with a once buzzing trolley and interurban rail system. Four students who were assigned 1800 foot passages that went into the Open Cut chose to create augmentations of our model that reanimate the ghosts of the original downtown and its topography, pinning this change into Lead’s urban narrative.

Materialities Yellow = Wood Frame Red = Masonry Walls Blue = Metal Structure White = Ghosts

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This document collects and reflects on an academic study of the urbanism of Lead, SD produced by the Fall 2017 students in Arch 101 under the direction of professor Brian T. Rex. The study is part of Public Works, an ongoing project to better understand the urban fabric of the state and grow the collective memory of the Department.

Publisher Department of Architecture (DoArch) South Dakota State University 905 N Campanile Ave. Brookings, SD 57007 www.sdstate.edu/architecture Typeset in Galaxy Polaris No part of this book may be reprinted without written consent from the author(s).

Arch 101 roster

Fall 2017

Tanner Heim 13 Jacob Walker 14 Walker Kropuenske

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Christopher Housken

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Monet Ernste 20 Ross Weisbecker 22 Benjamin Schumacher

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Ian French 26 Caleb Netten 28 Taiju Fujii 29 Monica Chavez Frias

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Brett Szymanski 32 Jaylee Sehr 34 Holly Hopkins 37 Collin Eichhorn 38 Taha Khader 39 Fernando Arechiga

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Dorcas Omilabu 41 Garret Foley 42 Becca Ymker 44 Naomi Stroeder 45

Project Assistants

2017/2018

Alejandro Marin Tolulope Oladimeji Oyeniyi

Student Workers

Summer 2018

Alexander Boerema Austin Beninga Autumn Kayl Juan Duque

Model Photos Amanda Jamison

Summer 2018 48-49,54-59,64-66

This document collects and reflects on an academic study of the urbanism of Lead, SD produced by the Fall 2017 students in Arch 101 under the direction of professor Brian T. Rex. The study is part of Public Works, an ongoing project to better understand the urban fabric of the state and grow the collective memory of the Department.

Publisher Department of Architecture (DoArch) South Dakota State University 905 N Campanile Ave. Brookings, SD 57007 www.sdstate.edu/architecture Typeset in Galaxy Polaris No part of this book may be reprinted without written consent from the author(s).