Yellowstone National Park functions as a vast machine of encounters with the national landscape. The most famous geothermal feature in the park is the Old Faithful Geyser recurring approximately every 90 minutes for over a century; with the 3 minute eruptions capturing the attention of thousands. The infrastructure of the site accommodates and holds the anticipation and physical space of waiting for thousands of visitors each day for the brief, distant, encounters. The project questions the singularity of the old faithful spectacle. The site is not wilderness, but a purposefully staged encounter with the surface phenomena of the geothermal. Moving uphill, Geyser hill hosts 50 geothermal features of many types, sizes, and periods. How can features with less grandeur or predictability be engaged with as spectacle? Engaging anew with the acts of waiting and viewing, the architecture responds to the periodicity in the unpredictable across different times scales of features and observation: to use architecture to moderate between people, collective and individual - in new proximity to the features, or via new senses: some enclose, some frame and address, others capture sounds and heat from the deep at the surface of the fragile landscape.
