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Arch2O.com - Architecture & Design Magazine
IKD?s proposal for the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library plaza, titled Conversation Plinth, pays homage to J Irwin Miller and aims to celebrate the community of Columbus. Its form takes cues from the conversation pit in the living room in the Miller House, as well as the plinths that elevate the important landmarks immediately surrounding the site?the library designed by I. M. Pei, the First Christian Church designed by Saarinen church, and the Large Arch by Henry Moore.
Courtesy of IKD
Courtesy of IKD – Project Facts Diagram
The installation offers a place for the community to gather and converse, and elevates people, both literally and metaphorically. Starting around the perimeter of the Moore sculpture on the eastern half of the site, large shifting timber discs compose a series of plinths that rise upward towards the west. Courtesy of IKD
By bridging across the now defunct rotary and occupying what is now an empty area of the plaza, the installation seeks to restore programmatic function to the site, encourage dynamic circulation around the sculpture, and allow the plaza to be experienced in a new way, in both horizontal and vertical directions.
Courtesy of IKD
The installation would be made of a hi-tech engineered timber product called CLT, or Cross Laminated Timber. Although softwood CLT already exists in the US, hardwood CLT, native and abundant in Indiana, does not. The proposal aims to jumpstart and accel...