Tower

The metal grain bin silo continues to serve as a visual marker (tower!) in Central Pennsylvania’s agricultural landscape, often becoming a billboard for communal or commercial promotion. We proposed to create an urban cousin of the rural grain silo – the Lancaster Gateway Bundle. The Bundle, or extended silo tower, at Lancaster Brewery enhances the visual awareness of the site and strengthens connectivity to the downtown. It functions to engage the community on multiple levels, offering a platform for burgeoning downtown the art scene as well as educating passers-by to stormwater management and environmental stewardship. The form and structure of the Bundle mark the transition from Lancaster’s outskirts and farmland into the urban proper by tapping into the local iconography of both agriculture and beercraft and referencing symbols of national and universal significance. The iconic American farmstead continues to permeate the landscape as the symbol of great practical invention; grain bins and water silos become the points by which one can begin to understand its inner workings – markers for the practical aspects of agrarian life. In the city, this notion is often reversed, with the building itself serving as marker, and its infrastructure shrouded in layers of building material.

Cross-pollinating these ideas of history, ecology, and infrastructure into a singular form, the art piece invites the public to understand the role that art and infrastructure might play in the new paradigm of the sustainable city.

The Lancaster Gateway Bundle is an effort to re-integrate the idea of marker-infrastructure back into the fabric of the city. Consisting of a tall steel structure and a 750 gallon cistern, the Bundle taps into existing storm water runoff systems in order to reduce the amount of contaminated water that flows into the Conestoga River and the Susquehanna water shed each year. The Gateway Bundle becomes a fusion between art and infrastructure, fulfilling both the aesthetic role of the marker, as well as the utilitarian function of retaining stormwater. The structure is an homage to the agrarian roots of the City of Lancaster, recalling days in which railroads imported and exported agricultural products from the surrounding area, as well as the importance of water in everyday life. Wood fins evoke old railroad equipment, and a metal cover around the cistern becomes a nod to the grain bins and silos so familiar to the area. An operable drip arm, protruding from the sculpture, celebrates the event of water retention with a subtle flow of water when the cistern is filled. And lights between the cistern and its cover illuminate the art piece at night, once again calling attention to itself as a new participant in the fabric of Lancaster.