Clay to Corn: Farm Credit Services of America Campus
/The west building of the Farm Credit Services of America corporate campus is the third in a series of structures on the campus from design firm Clark & Enersen. It won a Best in Class award from the Brick Industry Association’s 2021 Brick in Architecture Awards. Farm Credit’s history and its grain belt location in Omaha, Nebraska played heavily in the designers’ creative use of fired clay brick.
Using two brick colors from Yankee Hill Brick set at varying depths, the building’s east facade is an abstract view of the Midwest landscape from the hypothetical vantage of a drone. Why a drone? Drones occupy an expanding role in the practice of precision agriculture, itself a product of high tech tools and a rapid pace of innovation. The different depths of brick provide an ever-changing pattern of shadows throughout the day. Visualizing the facade treatment in this way is a nod to the ever-changing face of agriculture and the innovativeness of its practitioners.
The experience of looking down rows of corn in a field is mimicked in the brickwork done by Jeff MacTaggart Masonry. The effect is produced by rotating the brick horizontally in a repeating, offset pattern providing the texture of the “plants” while the subtly contrasting colors allow the eye to recognize space between the rows. The low-elevation, birds-eye perspective indeed says “precision” and “agriculture” in the same breath. The carefully executed brick pattern changes slightly every few bricks to align to a single vanishing point.
Long a staple of construction on the prairie, brick was the ideal facade material to express the abstract agricultural concepts baked into the structure. Brick’s subtle beauty mirrors that of the surrounding landscape and the sense of permanence it delivers calls to mind the client’s long-standing connection and commitment to the region.
All photos by Tom Kessler.
