Mill Sketch Series

While visiting Minneapolis over the 4th of July weekend I became fascinated with the milling industry and how it shaped the city. The success of the city directly coordinates with the milling industry's success and eventual failure within the city. The fascination with the milling industry followed me back to Omaha as I spent a week researching and sketching through my thoughts. The tiers that were evident within the milling industry and the process of the milling itself were extremely complex yet felt almost barbaric. The sketches below explain the importance of hydro power and ventilation in turn of the century mills. The sketches became a vehicle for exploration into a satire drawing that addresses the failures of modernist planning and design as well as vertical mobility and social hierarchy. It takes place within the the ventilation tubes drawn in sketch 2. Sketch 3 functions as a city with each tier having a specific purpose. The further down into the tube, near the discharge station, the tasks become more manual and grueling. The floor plates are tighter and shrink as  spaces become more condense. The bottom tiers are left to handle the higher tiers discharge (Flour) as it flows through the disposal tubes causing a higher risk of disease (white lung). The higher tiered class has access to private transportation docks even though they are closer the the mass transit hub. The lower tears do not share in the luxuries and have to travel vertically toward the mass transit hub. A tasks that should not be taken lightly as the path is filled with segmented floors and partial ladder connections. 

AW

Bus ride sketch. Early attempt at diagramming the use of hydro power and intake formation for the milling industry in Minneapolis.

Diagrammatic understanding of the metaphorical movement of particles suspended in space creating a cause and effect of ventilation in the milling industry

Inhabiting the inhabitable. Progress marker

Inhabiting the inhabitable. Working through concepts of vertical mobility social idiosyncrasies and fails of modernist planning and design using the mill sketch series as the vehicle of exploration.

Photographs from my trip to Minneapolis of the Gold Medal Flour Mill which is now Mill City Museum.