Photos: Whitney Koch
At the entrance driveway to Altstadt Brewery, visitors are greeted by a barn-like, decorative display building. Inside: steam tractors. A full-length window wall with floor-to-ceiling glazing allows views of vintage steam tractors day and night.
Building requirements for the Tractor Museum were numerous when the owner hired Mustard Design Architects to design the project. However, Whitney Koch, AIA, NCARB, architect at Mustard Design, says the owner also allowed her firm a lot of flexibility in how to meet the requirements.
Koch says the owner wanted the building to display and store 1930s-era steam tractors, look like a traditional barn and have a full-length glazed side on the streetside to allow views of the tractors. “That was really it. He left the big design aesthetics up to me to formulate and design. And so, what I started to think about were traditional barn stylings that had exposed timber construction. I thought if I could do a similar style of building, but use steel construction, I could play off the natural elements of a traditional barn while utilizing the modern, industrial look of exposed steel.”
The museum needed to house large steam tractors, connecting the design to the tractors physically. Additionally, visually, the design connects with the tractors with exposed metal and many mechanical elements.
The owner wanted the museum design to be unlike other buildings on the site, Koch says. All this, and it needed to be on time and on budget too. Solutions were as plentiful as the building requirements. A 3,429-square-foot customized metal building system met functional, aesthetic, budget and schedule requirements.
A raised standing seam monitor roof with clerestory windows and semi-passive ventilation system fits the tractors’ heights and looks like a barn. The full-length window wall has custom box columns that frame the exhibits. Wood elements add natural materials to the mix.
Relative to the custom metal building meeting functional requirements, it provided clear spans to house the tractors and large doors to move them in and out of the building.
“The raised taller portion in the middle was a direct relationship to the steam tractor,” Koch says. “Because of the height of the steam tractor and the clearances we needed above it, we did require a taller roof. We have that as the larger portion in the middle. The building was designed for two large Case tractors. Then, the lower portion, the kind of shed off to the side, is for some smaller tractors. And that was also done so that the more voluminous space was really highlighting the key tractors. Then, the secondary spaces that highlight some of the others.”
The custom metal building met aesthetic requirements. Koch says, “I wanted it to have more than just the look of a pre-engineered metal building; I wanted it to be more than just a base frame. Traditional barn styling can have long, clerestory roofs; that’s something I wanted to make sure we played on.”
DR Welding and Construction Inc. erected a rigid frame metal building system from Prime Metal Buildings and Components.
