The De Smet Highway 14 Nature Tower emulates and expresses the interplay between two distinct site systems critical to De Smet’s history and culture - The farmland grid, which runs strictly along the cardinal directions, and the linear transportation infrastructure that weaves through the grid from east to west, freely curving through and juxtaposing the strict orthogonal grid.
This infrastructure symbolizes two distinct moments in De Smet’s history. The freight railroad speaks to De Smets’s history as a cattle town in the early 20th century, when the rail line and the cattle shipped on it were the bedrock of its economy. Highway 14, on the other hand, is critical for modern De Smet, allowing easy visitor access to the Ingalls Wilder Homestead as well as the small businesses and restaurants in town. The highway also opens up to the town’s residents beautiful vistas of the state, giving them easy access to all the state has to offer.
These two pieces of infrastructure weave and interlace across the state like twine in a rope, stringing together a series of towns in the vast farmland grid. These intersections between the freight railroad, Highway 14, and farmland grid is what the nature tower evokes - two linear systems intersecting on a vast natural plane.
The nature tower emphasizes horizontality in order to complement the landscape and harmonize with the highway and railroad that inspired it. The tower is composed of two intersecting axes, one which runs parallel to the freight railroad to the north, and one parallel to Highway 14 to the south, forming a microcosm of the relationship between the two pieces of infrastructure at the scale of the state.
While in the covered “indoor” portions of the tower, these two axes provide distinct framed views of all the natural and manmade components which make up this site. The Highway 14 axis frames a view of De Smet to the north and a view over the Big Slough to the south. The freight railroad axis frames a view to Highway 14 to the west, and Silver Lake to the east. Stepping out onto the balconies atop each layer exposes one to panoramic views of De Smet’s ecosystem. The bottom layer of the tower acts as a bridge along the hiking trail across a small portion of the Big Slough. A grain silo-inspired spiral stair and single-occupant platform elevator placed at the hinge-point provides access to the upper layers of the tower. Each layer is constructed as a 10’ x 10’ timber box truss. The layers are stacked atop one another and clad in a wood screen, enabling views through the screen when looking perpendicular to the axis, but maintaining the framed views by appearing opaque while looking parallel to the axis. These screens emphasize the critical intersection; from any given vantage point the two axes take on slightly different opacities due to their misalignment.
The Highway 14 Nature Tower is about De Smet’s relationship to natural and man-made systems, how the systems overlap and intersect, and how those intersections are critical to the harmonious pairing of economy and ecosystem.
