Location : Park City, Utah
Area : 34,500 sf
Program : History Museum, Visitor Center & Recreation Facility
Completion : 1996

Most of the buildings were filled to capacity with milling machinery, bruising crushers and the like, connected by angling, enclosed, steel-sided conveyors. The first order of design was to peel the skin off these giant mantis limbs, in order to begin to reveal the prospective visitor the skeletal and “nervous” system of the entire mining process.  It became the concept, after all: the conveyance of people (today’s economic unit) entwined with the physical, awe-inspiring remnants of the conveyance of silver ore (yesterday’s), along a railway of information about the human toil and real struggle it expired to extract and produce all that precious, blinding silver. A giant stope (a square-set, or laid-over, cube whose edges consist of eighteen by eighteen inch timbers mortised together, and capable, within reason, of supporting the heavy ground of the mine while also acting as scaffolding for its fellows) announces the entry and moreover, the entire project (a clever sort of “building as sign” excluded from the strict ordinance calculations), while at the same time effectively diluting the ubiquitous yellow metal wall planes. At certain points along his or her conveyance, the visitor can picture a “neutron bomb” type effect (in reality, the Hunts’ speculation), which is the best kind of preservation, by design.