“Wild West”

The wild west. Maybe most well-known from Hollywood’s western films depicting the west and the people who live there as lawless, tough, independent, and rugged. Home to ranchers, cowboys, farmers, and also, the most potentially lethal weapons known to man. During the Cold War, dozens of nuclear missile silos were covertly hidden underground within the fields and ranches of Northern Colorado and Southern Wyoming. These silos, organized in groups of ten and referred to as "flights," brought government funding, infrastructure, and economic growth to what was once a desolate frontier.

This project critically examines the romanticized mythology of the West, the extractive exploitation of resources like copper, gold, and uranium, and the Cold War’s fervent production of nuclear weapons. A series of luxury, monumental bathhouses are constructed across a flight of missile silos that straddles the Colorado/Wyoming boarder, making these once covert sites overt. The solid mass of the tower was subtracted out using cylindrical volumes to create a colonnade, which blurs the threshold from the exterior to the interior. The cylindrical subtractions from the vertical mass creates an abstracted column. The constant, repeated, and randomized subtraction also erases the sense of a singular front or back to the building, which is appropriate in an open field. A multi-domed ceiling, formed by the same cylindrical subtractions, offers a striking view for visitors floating in a high-salinity pool below.

The architectural references to classical columns and domes evoke Roman baths and spaces of power, linking these bathhouses to the grandeur of ancient architecture and the solemnity of governmental and religious spaces—fitting for a site that once housed the world’s most powerful weapon.

The space where the nuclear missiles once sat in the earth are retrofitted into nuclear reactors, similar to those of the nuclear power plants, which heat water for the bathhouse and making steam for saunas, juxtaposing tranquility and healing with the ominous history of the site. This unusual pairing of a cleansing, restorative program with the remnants of a weapon of mass destruction challenges visitors to confront the surreal history of the location, leaving them to ponder: should they even step into the water?