Written by Brian Johnson Our afternoon in Spearfish began with a great, albeit toasty, tour of the new East Jackson Boulevard work recently completed by Tallgrass Landscape Architecture. This project was a unique collaboration between the design team, the City of Spearfish, and other significant stakeholders to redesign one of the area’s most travelled routes.…
Written by Jenn Johnson On the morning of Thursday, July 15, the 10th Anniversary of the AIA South Dakota Design in the Hills event was welcomed by Deadwood Mayor David Ruth Jr. at their recently completed Outlaw Square project. This year’s event had record attendance, celebrating the theme ‘Reconnection’ after a year apart. Kevin Kuchenbecker,…
Thursday, July 15 will kick off the 10th Anniversary of the AIA South Dakota Design in the Hills event. This year’s event will commence at the recently completed Outlaw Square project in Deadwood, SD with a presentation by Deadwood’ Kevin Kuchenbecker. The Outlaw Square project took several years of planning and involvement from design firms…
After a year apart and celebrating the 2020 Design in the Hills event virtually through blogposts highlighting previous years, we are coming back together for an in-person event. This year is a special 10-year anniversary celebration of Design in the Hills with a theme of ‘reconnection’. The theme references a time for design professionals to…
The un-conference Design in the Hills event was certainly a change for the committee and the architects in the area who have enjoyed our annual gathering. We hope that everyone has enjoyed the trip down memory lane as we recapped each year of Design in the Hills since 2011 via Blueprint South Dakota blogposts throughout the month of July. On behalf of the committee, we want to extend our greatest thank you to our sponsors for making this year’s virtual platform a possibility. We appreciate the agility to adapt as we brainstormed the possibilities for this year and patience as we navigated a different approach to celebrating the built environment.
In 2019, Rapid City made its biennial appearance as the host of Design in the Hills. Because of the numerous technologically innovative projects recently completed in Rapid City, the theme of 2019 was “Innovation RC.” The Design in the Hills Committee also decided to try something new in 2019 – a Call for Submissions throughout the region for built works and current research in the field of design innovation.
Our 2018 Design in the Hills event took us to the southern hills of Custer. Our theme that year centered around the concept of New Ruralism. New Ruralism can be described as an evolving rural planning approach rooted in respect for cultural heritage and empowerment of residents to actively participate in shaping their own environment. The approach focuses on making rural areas thriving, sustainable places to live and work. Custer possesses a great wealth of cultural resources which our event focused on.
Congratulations to Eden Bhatta, whose photo of the Neowise comet over Crazy Horse Memorial is this week’s Black Hills & Badlands Tourism Association photo contest winner!
The Design in the Hills 2017 theme was Adaptations. The committee set out to find exciting projects and planning efforts in the Rapid City community that were examples of architectural adaptations. The first day started with a morning outing on the infamous ‘Da Bus’ and ended with a walking tour through the East of 5th street corridor of downtown Rapid City. The first stop on ‘Da Bus’ was at the Bridger Steel plant in Blackhawk. The tour was enlightening to the attendees as they learned about the process of manufacturing metal panels.
The Design in the Hills 2016 theme was Reclamation. Artist Dale Lamphere helped us kick off the 2016 event with a site visit to the remote site east of Rapid City where he was designing, constructing and assembling the now-famous Dignity sculpture. The sculpture of a Native American woman holding a star quilt is 50 feet high, 16 feet deep and 32 feet wide and has more than 100 blue diamond shapes in the quilt that were originally designed to move in the wind. The sculpture now stands on a hill overlooking the Missouri River off of Interstate 90 near Chamberlain, SD.