Over the recent Thanksgiving holiday break I took a roadtrip from Colorado to my native Kentucky. This is the vast Flyover land of the center of the United States. It is roughly the former vast inland sea from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachian Mountains. It is certainly the least densely populated one third to one half of the the US, and largely dominated by fields and pasture, sheds and barns, farmhouses and shacks of agricultural America.
This immense area - eastern Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, western Kentucky - is not the stuff of dramatic landscapes. That is not to say that it is not beautiful, but it is a softer, more subtle set of relationships between land and sky that makes this area's initial uniformity peel away to reveal an intensely beautiful sense of place. And in that flat, or gently rolling landscape, a building sticking up from the earth holds a kind of power that qualifies the space around it. A sense of space aggregates around a building. Here in the Rocky Mountains and in so many places along the eastern seaboard, there seems to be a natural space that buildings have been placed within. But in these midwestern plains, a building makes a space, a small domesticated sphere that comes into being only by the nature of the building.
