INTRODUCTION

A ‘core sample’ is a measure of what something is made of and a guide to its history. This project creates a new urban landscape on an agricultural site by using urban train cars. We take a sample of the San Francisco urban fabric and transplant it to the rural California landscape. Likewise, the Western Railway Museum takes vintage urban rail cars and transfers them to a rural site. The new urban diagram form is an abstraction of the San Francisco city grid, and it takes the most iconic location where the two grid systems meet at Market Street. The formal strategy begins with the core sample, maintains its 3-dimensionality, and elevates this core above the landscape. By elevating it, we both emphasize its foreign presence here and allow for a continuity of the ground plane of the surrounding landscape into the lower level of the museum. At the ground level, trains and visitors can enter the building. Trains travel along tracks that follow a city grid, most closely in this central portion that echoes Market Street. From the upper level, museum visitors are keenly aware of the clash between city and rural as experienced through urbanization, suburbanization, and the transformation of the landscape.