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Emerging Voices 2011: De Leon & Primmer

Emerging Voices 2011: De Leon & Primmer

De Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop

Louisville, Kentucky

Roberto de Leon and Ross Primmer aren’t radicals. Rather, they prefer a more reasoned and contextual architecture rooted in community involvement. “We’re not really looking to play outside the box,” explained De Leon. “We’re more interested in collaborating and learning to work within the existing rules to create something new.”

This approach has helped guide the duo behind De Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop in    

It turned out, De Leon recalls, that being local had its own hurdles. After winning a competition, for example, his firm was later rejected for lack of national name recognition. “We simply weren’t an out-of-town firm,” De Leon said. “We were always competing against outsiders, which is a little ironic considering the rise of sustainability and the localism that supports it.”

Those local roots, however, have informed such projects as the Mason Lane Farm Operations Facility, where De Leon & Primmer used locally-harvested bamboo and simple construction methods from the surrounding agricultural region to create an elegant lattice structure with an adjacent corrugated metal barn that are distinctly modern with a rural flavor.

 

Now, De Leon & Primmer is collaborating on a sprawling high-adventure base camp for the Boy Scouts of America situated on a reclaimed coal strip mine in West Virginia. The site seems tailor-made for De Leon & Primmer, who are collaborating with Lake Flato, BNIM, Mithun, and Fernau+Hartmen to create a series of villages focused on the site’s varied landscapes including wetlands and exposed coal seams.

 

“We were interested in architecture that impacts the landscape at an infrastructural level,” De Leon said. He and Primmer are designing ten structures at the scout camp, from an interactive merit badge pavilion to restrooms and cisterns.

   

The basic necessities of the program do not diminish their enthusiasm. “It’s about what these mundane little buildings can become,” said De Leon. “Everyone has to use the restroom; these buildings are part of any site’s pervasive experience. We’re interested in the in-between spaces that connect buildings—the front stoops—where happenstance moments occur, where interpersonal connections take place.”

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