Last Chance Module Array. Last Chance, Colorado. (Modules No. 4, 5). With Onix Architects. 2015-2016.
The Last Chance Module Array is part of M12’s Prairie Module series. The array is made up of two cubes that have been extruded to create a visual field containing a multiplicity of crosshatched forms. Despite its formal simplicity, the Last Chance Module Array contains many points of conceptual entry, from farm and ranch architecture to rural planning grids. The forms are reminiscent of rural timber frame structures and pole barns—their timbers having been finished with a Japanese wood burning technique known as Shou Sugi Ban, wherein cedar is burned to make the material more durable. The overall arrangement resembles a ghost-like structure, akin to what artist Robert Smithson referred to as a “ruin in reverse.” Alone in the landscape, it appears newly built or, just as easily, to have always been there, disintegrating over decades.
An ambivalent love song to the fading agricultural plains of centuries past, the Last Chance Module Array is a quiet complex for experiencing the subtlety of this site. A meditation on the High Plains region in Eastern Colorado in particular, the piece invites visitors to acknowledge their complex and often overlooked relationship to this place and to the environment, both built and “natural,” positive and negative. Positioned to align with the horizon and celestial phenomena, it is also an unapologetic celebration of the openness of this land, with the sun rising and setting in the center of the main module structure during the summer and winter solstices.
