Imago Earth Center

Imago Earth Center inhabits a parcel of land surrounded by development. Yet at a larger scale, this land can be seen as a remnant of the once-forested region. It is a small patch of nature protruding into the city grid. It is a site of resistance against the forces of consumption and control.

Architect Rem Koolhaas observed: “The Grid is, above all, a conceptual speculation … in its indifference to topography, to what exists, it claims the superiority of mental construction over reality. Through the plotting of its streets and blocks it announces that subjugation, it not obliteration, of nature is its true ambition.”

But the subjugation is not complete: the rational order of the grid encounters topography and rivers and a multiplicity of local conditions. It runs up against the very different order of Nature. And it is in these moments of failure of the rational, of the controlling ambition, that we find room for beauty, humanism, and imagination.

The city grid symbolically continues into the site, a reminder of what the land could have become. The buildings (man-made constructions like the grid) lay along these paths. But they also respond to another order: the North-South order of nature. The resulting conflict is celebrated in the open corridors that at once slash through the building and weave the site together.

Materials include:

1. straw bale: agricultural waste

2. glue-lam beams: sustainably harvested lumber

3. reused Chicago Common Brick: available from Ohio Materials Exchange (OMEx)

4. interior partitions made of layered 2” thick particle board: available from Ohio Materials Exchange

5. steel columns and beams: from local industries (less than 500 miles)

The low-tech, labor-intensive nature of stray bale construction and the the particle board interior partitions provide opportunities for the community to get involved in the construction of Imago Earth Center, substituting consumption with solidarity.